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Chancellor Dennis Walcott and City Councilman Al Vann joined Boys and Girls High School Principal Bernard Gassaway to honor the school's boys basketball team for winning the city championships last year.

Among the dozen high schools the city spared from closure this week despite lagging scores, one stands out as lower-performing than almost all of the rest.

It also stands out for having an unusually powerful set of political allies.

Brooklyn’s Boys and Girls High School has poor student performance, an abysmal graduation rate — 38.6 percent last year  — and few applicants.

“If one looks at the data and the metrics by which all principals and schools are graded, it is very apparent that we are all not measured by the same yardstick,” said Geraldine Maione, the principal of William E. Grady Career and Technical High School, a higher-performing school that the city briefly proposed for closure last year.

It’s a fact that Principal Bernard Gassaway has acknowledged. “Statistically, they’ve closed schools that have better stats,” he told community members at an event in June, before the city’s latest round of performance data.

The secret to the school’s survival, people inside and outside the school say, appears to be a tight-knit advisory board of political and community heavyweights from the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn who say they have pulled strings at the school for years. (more…)