CHEAT SHEET TAPES
By DAVID ANDREATTA Education Reporter

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A principal and her assistant have been ousted from a Brooklyn middle school after getting caught on tape shrugging off complaints that students cheated on an eighth-grade state social-studies exam, education officials said yesterday.

Ilene Agranoff, the principal of JHS 14, and her assistant principal, Susan Feeley, were removed from the school last week after Education Department probers reviewed conversations secretly taped by a teacher.

The recordings, provided to The Post, offer a rare glimpse of the pressure administrators face to meet high standards and the anguish teachers endure when they try to blow the whistle on corruption.

The teacher, Ross Rosenfeld, was untenured and fired in the summer of 2004 after two years at JHS 14, also known as the Shell Bank School.

Pressed by Rosenfeld to explain the protocol for handling his discovery of a cheat sheet he believed was used by students on the exam, Agranoff told him, "Ignore it," and, "You think they know the answers?"

Confronted with a list of students Rosenfeld suspected of cheating, the assistant principal, Feeley, replied, "The blind leading the blind," then advised him against taking the matter to the principal.

"I got the impression that if they could find any excuse to push these kids up, they would do it," Rosenfeld told The Post.

Education Department spokeswoman Kelly Devers said the agency is pursuing disciplinary action against the administrators, but did not elaborate. Neither could be reached for comment.

The tapes, which include more than 45 minutes of conversations, reveal that both administrators had doubts about Rosenfeld's ability to control his students. At one point, the principal offered to assign a veteran teacher to help him. He refused.

Yet the principal is also heard saying that students who fail every quarter and score the lowest level on a state exam  grounds for being held back in grades three, five and seven under city policy  can still be promoted through their classroom work.

"You're supposed to try every which way to promote children," Agranoff said, and told Rosenfeld that he was "too concerned with the cheating."

During the same conversation, a United Federation of Teachers representative chimed in, saying, "They're probably giving each other wrong answers," and downplayed the importance of the exam in adding, "It's not the SAT."

david.andreatta@nypost.com