Not all good grades go on the fridge.
Seven of the 33 schools where the city is seeking to fire half the staff were rated an A or B on their latest city-issued report cards, a review by The Post found.
That means roughly 260 teachers are slated to be cleared out from schools that were just celebrated in the fall for making significant gains.
The mayor plans to close and reopen the schools this summer.
Although the city’s grading system rewards progress more than performance — meaning highly-rated schools aren’t necessarily above average — no A or B school has ever been shuttered.
“When you decided that you would close a school that got an A on your own bloody school progress reports…you lost all legitimacy in the eyes of the people of New York,” a fiery Leo Casey, vice president of the United Federation of Teachers, testified at last week’s Panel for Educational Policy meeting in Fort Greene.
The panel, which is stocked with mayoral appointees, will vote on whether to approve the reincarnations.
The lone A of the seven schools was W.H. Maxwell Career and Technical Education HS, which has steadily improved since scoring a D grade in 2009.
The other schools earned Bs — five after participating in a recently-aborted federal program that was intended to last three years.
It came to an abrupt halt not even midway through – suspending a $58 million grant – after the Department of Education and teachers’ union missed a Dec. 31 deadline to reach a deal on a new teacher evaluation system.
The disputed system is meant to eventually be used in all schools.
Last week, Mayor Bloomberg announced that the 33 schools would be shifted to a federal program that’s never been tried here – one that doesn’t require an evaluation agreement but that mandates the staff replacements.
The move was viewed as falling somewhere between political payback toward a defiant union and a necessary purge of sub-par educators.
A Department of Education spokesman would not explain the agency’s rationale for flagging schools it had rated highly, but noted that they had been labeled “Persistently Low-Achieving” by the state in 2009 or 2010.
He said a more detailed explanation would soon be available in applications to the State Education Department, which administers the program.
Yet documents the DOE submitted in June 2010 to get some of the schools into the initial three-year program show officials did not necessarily see poor teaching as the culprit.
”Global Studies is fortunate to have a staff that is committed, strong, dedicated, and hard-working,” the DOE gushed over the Brooklyn School for Global Studies in Cobble Hill, which catapulted from an F grade in 2010 to a B in 2011.
For IS 136 in Sunset Park, the DOE identified a number of factors outside the staff’s control – but within the DOE’s responsibility – that were contributing to its low performance.
”The lack of maintenance and an inadequate electrical supply has a negative effect on the school’s ability to continuously improve the quality of student learning,” city officials wrote last year.
State Education Commissioner John King has signaled he’s likely to approve the city’s bid to overhaul the 33 schools.
The UFT has threatened legal action to protect roughly 1,750 teachers from being bounced if he does.
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