The numbers from the Independent Budget Office also show that the 25 schools slated for closure have more students with special education designations than the average school.

Only 1.1 percent of students enrolled in targeted high schools are white versus 13 percent citywide. In lower-grade schools being shut down, 2 percent of kids are white; citywide 15 percent of students in those grades are.

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Chancellor Dennis Walcott has stated a personal and departmental goal of creating 50 new, high-quality middle schools during the last two years of the Bloomberg administration. Accordingly, middle-school grades are often lopped off in this year's truncations, perhaps to create room for a swath of new middle schools come September. (At a town hall meeting in Brooklyn last week, the chancellor said the DOE would open 50 new schools this fall, but he did not say how many would be middle schools.) Read More»

This year, fewer high schools were awarded grades of A or B, DOE officials said: 38 percent of high schools got As last year, compared with 32 percent this year. The progress scores this year measured and rewarded college readiness as well as academic progress made by high-need students—particularly black and Hispanic boys, English language learners, and children with special needs.

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This was welcome transparency compared with the early years of Progress Grades, when DOE announced school-closing lists as faits accompli, without community feedback or participation.

But while the public is learning more about what might be done after this year's round of progress reports, understanding of the reports themselves is not widespread—largely because the reports employ a complicated formula that has evolved since 2007, when the DOE began rating city schools with letter grades.

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The latest installment of the Community Service Society's "Unheard Third" survey –which aims to amplify the voices of low-income New Yorkers—also finds that more people believe public schools are succeeding than did in 2002.

CSS, which owns City Limits, found that 37 percent of those surveyed gave the schools a grade of A or B compared to 22 percent in 2002. Nine percent said the schools were failing, down from 14 percent nine years ago. Lower-income New Yorkers were more likely to give high grades than their more affluent neighbors. Impressions of public schools improved from 2002 to 2011 across boroughs and races (with the exception of Staten Island, whose sample was too small to offer comparisons, and Asians, whose view of schools did not change perceptibly.)

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Whatever the wisdom of the DOE strategy, schools on the shut-down list dwell in a strange limbo: Slated for closure, they cannot accept new students, but they are duty-bound to serve the students who remain enrolled. However, as the student population dwindles and teachers are tempted to find other jobs, the challenges of serving those last classes swell.

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