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A letter from Stanley Teitel announcing his resignation as Stuyvesant High School's principal was posted on the school's website.

Just weeks after a cheating scandal erupted at Stuyvesant High School, the schools longtime principal has resigned.

Stanley Teitel delivered his letter of resignation to Chancellor Dennis Walcott at 3:30 p.m. today, according to the Department of Education.

Teitel and Stuyvesant were thrust under scrutiny in June after news broke that dozens of students at the ultra-competitive school had received answers in advance to a Spanish exam via one student’s cell phone.

Teitel sent a letter to parents June 20 alerting them to the cheating and informing them that students suspected of cheating would lose some privileges, such as the right to leave campus for lunch. But the city did not find out about the cheating allegations for nearly a week after that letter went home, and the penalties the school levied did not match those outlined in the city’s discipline code.

An initial phase of the cheating investigation concluded in early July, with the city requiring 69 students to retake the end-of-year Spanish exam they took in June.

When he announced the penalties, Walcott said the next phase would be to examine whether Teitel and his staff followed the appropriate protocol after learning about the cheating. (more…)

A group of elected officials are touting a policy brief that they say throws cold water on Mayor Bloomberg’s small schools movement just a day after a comprehensive study gave it a ringing endorsement.

The six-page brief, compiled by the Coalition for Educational Justice, focuses on how the new small schools serve students with special needs and concludes that they tend to under-enroll students whose disabilities are severe. It cited eight closed large high schools where the small schools opened up in their buildings that served significantly fewer self-contained students. A complete copy of the brief is below.

The six-page paper comes a day after MDRC published a study that found that all kinds of students at more than 100 small high schools graduated at higher rates statistically identical students who attended larger schools.

The brief’s focus didn’t necessarily debunk the MDRC findings, but attempted to raise additional issues about school closures.

“While it is commendable that the new small schools are producing higher graduations rates, it is not clear that these schools serve the same population,” the paper says. “The MDRC study does not include students in self-contained special education or collaborative team teaching; the omission of those high-needs students increases graduation rates in the new small schools.” (more…)