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Student protesters unfurled a banner listing names of the schools that could close this year.

Students from at least five city high schools walked out of classes this afternoon in opposition to the city’s school closure proposals. (more…)

Two weeks after receiving the surprise news that their schools could close this June, some teachers are staging protests while others say they are too stunned to respond, for now.

At Herbert H. Lehman High School in the Bronx, Ann Looser is hoping fifty to 100 of her fellow teachers will stay after school tonight to protest city plans to “turn around” Herbert H. Lehman High School. As Lehman’s union chapter leader, Looser has led efforts to raise awareness about the city’s plan to “turn around” the school. Under the plan, which the city devised to keep federal funding despite a breakdown in negotiations over teacher evaluations, 33 low-performing schools would be closed and reopened after having half of their teachers replaced.

At Lehman, Looser and her colleagues have been trying recruit families, local politicians, and journalists to attend tonight’s “early engagement” hearing. The goal, she said, is to convince the city not to upend progress that the school had been making with the help of federal funds.

Under “restart,” Lehman had used the funds to offer credit recovery programs, peer mentoring, and extra training for teachers, Looser said. She said the extra help came at an important juncture, just as a new principal arrived after years of turmoil that included a grade-changing scandal. Purging the school’s teachers would set those efforts back, Looser said. (more…)

Three schools that are getting millions of dollars in federal aid are among 27 schools newly added to the list of schools that could be closed.

Department of Education officials announced today that they had added 17 high schools, six charter schools, and the middle school grades of four secondary schools to the list of schools they are considering closing. The schools join 20 elementary and middle schools where the city began “early engagement” meetings in September about .

The high school additions include three schools receiving federal “transformation” funding; troubled Lehman High School, which handed out the most suspensions in the city by far; and most schools that got F’s on this year’s progress reports. Seven of the schools are in the Bronx, where large high schools say they are straining to serve high numbers of needy students; five in Manhattan; three in Brooklyn; and two in Queens.

Department officials compiled the shortlist by looking at schools’ progress report grades, their Quality Reviews, the results of state evaluations, and the efforts they’ve already undertaken to improve. But in holding early engagement meetings, the department hopes to learn why the schools are struggling and whether other efforts could help them, according to Marc Sternberg, the DOE deputy chancellor in charge of school closures.

Echoing an argument that advocacy groups are pushing at schools on the potential closure list, teachers union president Michael Mulgrew said he thought the department was not entering the engagement meetings in good faith. (more…)

Buried in a New York Times article about the suspension of George Washington High School’s famed baseball coach is a reminder of the steep challenge students face when trying to switch high schools.

Fernelys Sanchez was admitted to Lehman High School in the Bronx but wanted to play baseball for George Washington’s winning team, the Times reports. So he moved into his father’s apartment in Washington Heights. Then he tried — for more than a year before he succeeded — to win a transfer.

But a policy shift over the last several years means that the city’s system of school choice largely closes off once students are in high school.

“For whatever reason, it has become increasingly difficult, almost impossible, to get a transfer to another regular high school,” Pamela Wheaton of Insideschools told me two years ago. City officials say it’s not educationally sound for students to change high schools unless they absolutely have to.

The city gives three reasons students can transfer from one high school to another: a long commute, a safety risk, or a health issue. Sanchez’s family said he tried all of them: (more…)

Four schools that the city tried to close last year will stay open after officials decided that they had shown enough improvement to earn a reprieve.

The schools — three of them high schools and one a middle school — were among 19 schools the city tried and failed to close last year after the teachers union sued to stop the closures. Given another year, but significantly fewer students and funding, most of those 19 schools were recommended for closure again this year. None of them are being considered for the other two school improvement strategies suggested by the federal government that the city will use in other struggling schools.

The four schools that faced closure last year, but will remain open, are the Choir Academy of Harlem’s high school grades, Maxwell Career and Technical High School, the Middle School for Academic and Social Excellence, and Business, Computer Applications, and Entrepreneurship High School.

City officials cited the schools’ improvement on their progress reports, which are given to schools annually and assign them grades from A through F. (more…)

City officials brushed off parents’ concerns over an ongoing cheating investigation at a Bronx high school last night, telling them that if the principal had really been changing grades, the school wouldn’t be failing.

In 2009, teachers at Herbert Lehman High School reported that executive principal Janet Saraceno was changing dozens of students’ grades in order to boost the school’s graduation rate. More than a year later, Saraceno remains under investigation and Lehman is teetering on the edge of being shut down by the city after receiving an F on its progress report. Yet when parents asked Department of Education officials about the investigation at a meeting last night, they were told to ignore it.

“Let’s let the investigators do their work,” said Juan Ruiz, a DOE official heading the team assigned to support Lehman. He told parents that if Saraceno had really been changing students’ grades from failing to passing, “we probably wouldn’t have an F.”

In fact, Saraceno is only under investigation for changing grades during the 2008-09 school year and Lehman’s progress report grade for that year was a B. A year later, after DOE officials became aware of the cheating and began to monitor the school more closely, its grade fell to an F. (more…)

Chancellor Joel Klein said the city would consider schools' new grades before deciding which ones to close.

For a few high schools, the grades they got on this year’s progress reports could make the difference between life and death.

Though most schools’ grades didn’t change dramatically from last year, several schools the city tried to close last year saw improvement this year while others that had once been good schools have fallen to the bottom.

Of the 19 schools the city unsuccessfully tried to close for poor performance last year, two schools had their grades jump multiple rungs. W.H. Maxwell Career and Technical Education High School and the Choir Academy of Harlem, both of which got D’s last year, and got B’s this time.

Chancellor Joel Klein said the Department of Education would take the new, higher grades into consideration when deciding whether to try and close the schools it had once deemed “failures” a second time.

“We put great weight on the grades,” he said at a press conference this morning at Manhattan Bridges High School. “We announced those schools based on the information we had at the time.” (more…)

As Lehman students walked to school this morning, many noted that they'd likely spend the day waiting for class schedules.

Scheduling snafus are an annual rite at city schools during the first week back. But those problems have been magnified at Herbert Lehman High School, where computer glitches and failed planning have left students sitting in the auditorium rather than in class.

Teachers and students said that since school began last Wednesday, hundreds of students haven’t known where to go or what classes to attend. Instead, many of the school’s 4,000 students have been told to sit in the auditorium while guidance counselors sort out the problem. Many have simply gone home.

Most schools work on students’ schedules over the summer and make adjustments the first week back when a glut of new students arrive on their doorsteps. But teachers said Lehman administrators hadn’t done this.

“The principal is blaming some computers going down, but in your average decent school this is addressed over the summer. The students deserve an education from day one,” said a Lehman teacher. “It’s never been this bad.”

On her way into the building this morning, Stephanie Caceres, 16, said she expected another day of waiting to get a class schedule.

“I haven’t been to class since the first day,” she said. (more…)

Lehman High School has metal detectors this year and a new neighborhood business: a phone storage truck. (via Twitter)

Someone must have tipped off this phone storage business to Lehman High School’s new metal detectors.

As of today, any of the Bronx high school’s several thousand students hoping to sneak their cell phones into the building will be out of luck. Though many schools ignore the city’s cell phone ban, those with scanners are often more severe, causing students to turn to bodegas and local businesses for storage space.

In the words of whoever posted this photo on Twitter: “Look who’s making 4,000 dollars today in front of Lehman High School!”

Even with names like “Pure Loyalty,” underground storage businesses are often unreliable and some students choose to evade the scanners through various and complicated forms of trickery.

As the city’s investigation into grade tampering by a high school principal enters its second year, morale at the school has taken a turn for the worse.

A majority of teachers at Herbert Lehman High School who took the city’s annual survey said they don’t trust the school’s executive principal Janet Saraceno. And 81 percent said the principal is not an effective manager.

Results from the survey of teachers, students, and parents also show that in the “safety and respect” category, Lehman is getting poor marks. In total, 23 percent of the school’s teachers and 63 percent of students took the survey, which is below the city’s average participation rates.

Lehman has struggled with student safety this year and is likely to have full-time scanners installed by next fall. While most teachers said they feel safe at the school, a majority also said that crime, violence, and gang activity are a problem.

After I reported on teachers’ complaints that Lehman’s principal was changing students’ grades, Department of Education officials responded by threatening to investigate the teachers. Since then, teachers report that the DOE has not contacted them, nor has the Office of Special Investigations, which is tasked with following up on complaints. (more…)