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Student grades are up at struggling Chelsea Career and Technical Education High School – a school with low graduation rates. But federal funds that school administrators credit with helping the recent transformation now hang in the balance.

The so-called war board is the the most eye-catching item in Principal Brian Rosenbloom’s office at Chelsea Career and Technical Education High School. It's a big, white dry-erase board listing the names of all seniors along with the number of credits and Regents exams needed to graduate in June.

Some Brooklyn parents hope the city's decision to postpone the vote on whether to phase-out their struggling elementary school means good news.

The fate of 13 more struggling schools will be determined by the Panel for Educational Policy when it votes Thursday night on whether the schools should be shuttered.

A panel controlled by mayoral appointees voted to close 10 low-performing schools Tuesday night following a raucous public hearing that pushed beyond midnight. What should happen to struggling schools? Take our poll.

At a Brooklyn elementary school set to be phased-out by the city, parents and educators will get to weigh-in tonight about the city's plans to replace it with a charter school. But many say their cries for help about mismanagement over the years were ignored.

Schools Chancellor Cathie Black attended a hearing Wednesday night on the proposal to close a Harlem Middle School that got a D on its latest report card. Hearings have been taking place all month at the 25 schools the city plans to phase out beginning next fall.

Eight city schools — nearly one-third of those slated for closure by the city's Department of Education — are small schools that were created to replace larger ones that Mayor Bloomberg previously closed, according to a new report from the Independent Budget Office.

With the Department of Education looking to phase-out 25 more low-performing schools, the City Council is seeking more information about what happened to students at similar schools that closed.

Parents wrangled over the proposal to phase out MS 571 in Prospect Heights and replace it with a charter school during a standing-room only hearing Monday night in the auditorium of PS 9, which shares a building with the middle school.

More than 100 parents and teachers, hoping to prevent Jamaica High from closing, turned out at the Department of Education's public hearing Thursday night to show their support for the school, one of 25 the city wants to close next fall.

In our ongoing series “The Big Fix,” WNYC and the website GothamSchools have been looking at three low-performing high schools. WNYC is following Chelsea Career and Technical Education High School, where teacher Tonja Weary got a big promotion in September. But she's not too happy about the title.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo, during his first State of the State speech, singled out a New York City principal whose school WNYC has been profiling in our "Big Fix" series with GothamSchools.

This week, the city is expected to announce the fate of more than 50 schools that could be closed because of low performance. Some of them could be phased-out starting next fall, while others could get federal funds to make improvements.

How do you improve a failing school? This fall, WNYC has been looking at that very question in a series we're calling The Big Fix. It's a collaboration with the Web site GothamSchools. Together we're following three low-performing high schools to see what they're trying. Two of them received federal grants to make improvements and the third did not. WNYC's Beth Fertig is covering Chelsea Career and Technical Education High School in Manhattan, which did receive one of the grants. She answers questions here on progress so far.

It's official. New York State has given New York City the $19.8 million it received in federal school improvement grants for 11 persistently low achieving high schools.

New York City has released its annual school report cards, or “progress reports,” for the 2009-2010 school year. These A-F letter grades consider attendance, graduation rates, credit accumulation, and surveys by parents, teachers and students. Schools are compared to similar schools and to high schools across the city. The three high schools GothamSchools and WNYC are following in our Big Fix series all received low grades. But there were some signs of improvement.

Almost 70 percent of the city's high schools that were graded this year got A's and B's, a slight drop from last year when the top marks went to 75 percent. The city says it raised the bar for high schools to earn the higher grades this year.

Infuriated by the union’s success in barring the closure of 19 public schools, Mayor Michael Bloomberg asked reporters last month why any parent would send their children to a “failing school.”

At Christopher Columbus High School in the Bronx, one of the 19 schools, there are as many answers to that question as there are freshmen.

Sixteen more low-performing city elementary and middle schools are being considered for possible phase-out or turnaround. That brings the total number of schools on the list to 47. The list also includes 19 schools the city had wanted to phase-out starting this fall before a state court found it didn't provide enough community notification.