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Principals feeling pressure to get A's putting pressure on parents, teachers to give them

BY Rachel Monahan
DAILY NEWS WRITER

These principals may be the real grade-grubbers.

Across the city, principals are under investigation for pressuring parents, students or teachers into giving them good reviews on the secret surveys that gauge school satisfaction.

Just a month after the Daily News obtained a recording of a Brooklyn principal threatening teachers for giving her shoddy reviews, another tape has emerged of a principal instructing teachers on the importance of giving high marks.

"If you give us low grades and that attacks our progress report grade, the school's going to close," Principal Mary Prendergast of the High School for Youth and Community Development says in a matter-of-fact tone.

She also notes that she considers the survey to be "stupid, quite frankly," and tells her teacher to "politically be smart."

"We live in a toxic political environment in the Department of Education," she explains. "I'm not putting this in a memo because these are the kind of things that can be misinterpreted."

Prendergast isn't alone. Yolanda Ramirez, principal of Public School 38 in Brooklyn, was caught on tape last year berating her teachers for giving her lousy reviews.

And education officials confirm they are investigating other cases of principals giving instructions on the surveys, which account for 10% of the A-to-F grades given to schools and are used to determine bonuses.

Contacted by The News, Prendergast acknowledges she's looking to improve her new small school's scores and that the threat of closure is a real one her teachers are generally aware of. But, she said, she wasn't trying to pressure her underlings.

"How does a principal advocate for doing the best we can without making it look like we're skewing the results?" she asked.

Education Department officials said they don't think there's "widespread" pressure on the surveys, noting 24% of teachers last year said they didn't "trust the principal at his or her word."

"We will not tolerate any attempt to manipulate survey results," said Danny Kanner, an Education Department spokesman, before bashing teachers for making the recordings.

But at PS 34 in Queens, a current and a former teacher charged their principal freaked out after they gave her poor reviews two years back, then tried to convince them that better reviews would mean a bigger bonus. Principal Pauline Shakespeare denied the charge through a secretary.