The city’s public high schools earned higher marks from the Department of Education compared with last year — with 7 percent more earning “A’s” or “B’s” and 4 percent fewer earning “D” or “F” grades, officials said yesterday.
This includes prestigious Stuyvesant HS in Battery Park City — which held onto its “A” despite widespread test cheating uncovered in June that involved more than 70 students.
Hs Grades 2012
“We basically saw folks who are on the edges between ‘D’ and ‘C’ and ‘C’ and ‘B’ moving a little bit, and you can get 5 or 6 percent shift [upward] like that,” said DOE Chief Academic Officer Shael Polakow-Suransky. “I would characterize it as a modest increase in terms of the overall scores.”
He credited much of the gains to roughly 5,000 more students graduating with Regents diplomas in 2012 than in 2011, based on preliminary city calculations.
The DOE could not provide the total number of grads in each of those years who earned Regents diplomas — which this year for the first time required scores of at least 65 out of 100 on five exams.
Just 10 schools earned an “F” this year, down from 14 last year, and 21 earned a “D” grade. In 2011, 32 schools got “D’s.”
Schools with “D’s” or “F’s” are automatically considered for closure or overhauls, as are those that get “C’s” for three straight years.
Among those, DOE officials identified two dozen they are considering closing or overhauling — based largely on the grades they earned yesterday and in recent years.
Among the schools facing possible closure are the last two remaining large high schools in The Bronx — DeWitt Clinton and Herbert Lehman — as well as four schools the city gave “C” grades this year.
Of the remainder of the 420 rated schools, 142 got an “A,” 159 got a “B” and 88 received a “C.”
For the first time this year, measures of whether schools are preparing kids to succeed after graduation counted toward 10 percent of a school’s mark.
