The rigorous standards at Brooklyn Tech HS appear to be too tough for some of the city’s other public high schools.
Two teachers from the elite school have filed a complaint alleging grade tampering after being told their scoring of this year’s history Regents essays for 12th-graders from another high school was too strict.
The stunned teachers said they were removed from scoring the essays at the Automotive HS grading site on June 20 and told their “harsh” scores were scrapped — because they could prevent seniors from graduating.
“The content leader gave us a package of thematic essays to grade and expressly told us to keep in mind that the students we were about to grade were seniors who needed to graduate,” one of the Brooklyn Tech teachers said in the complaint, obtained by The Post from an Automotive staffer.
The teachers assigned to Room 112 reported that they were treated like dunces when administrators at Automotive ordered them to the back of the classroom for a lecture.
The teachers from Brooklyn Tech — which Mayor de Blasio’s son, Dante, attends — scored the tests together as part of a program begun in the 2012-13 school year to farm out Regents grading so that teachers couldn’t inflate the grades of their own students.
Rules require that each essay be scored by two teachers on a scale of 0 to 5. If the two scores differ by more than a point, a third teacher is brought in to grade the exam to average out or resolve the difference.
One of the Brooklyn Tech teachers drew immediate scrutiny on June 19, the first day of grading, by giving an essay a 0.
“The content leader . . . asked if my colleague had read the essay, to which she replied, ‘Of course,’ ” said the complaint letter, written by a tenured 10-year vet.
At the end of the day, the teacher said that said some of their ratings showed a discrepancy of 2 to 3 points and required a third reader to grade the essays.
“On Friday, June 20, 2014, we reported to our room and sat down to grade. The content leader came over to us and in front of everyone told us that we were no longer grading thematic essays . . . My colleague asked why we were being transferred and the content leader told us that our grading was too harsh,” the letter said.
“My colleague asked, ‘What happened to our scores?’ [and] the content leader said all our essay scores had been erased and it was [Automotive assistant principal] Dr. [Theresa] Hunter’s decision.”
Automotive HS Principal Caterina Lafergola dismissed the claims of test fixing as nonsense.
“Brooklyn Tech is notorious for making unfounded complaints about Regents exams,” Lafergola said.
“There was no test fudging. There was no test tampering. Everything was handled per state regulations. Everything was above board.”
The city’s Department of Education confirmed that the scores were scrapped, but faulted the Tech teachers for improperly grading the exams.
“Any allegation of tampering with test scoring is taken very seriously, and this was no exception. We acted swiftly to ensure any exams that were incorrectly graded were re-scored according to state-mandated policies to protect the integrity of our students and their hard work,” said DOE spokeswoman Devora Kaye.