"I'm just completely devastated because the teachers know us, this is a good school, and we feel safe here, " said Lisa Colon, 41 years old, as she dropped off her 5-year-old son at Holy Spirit School in the Bronx, which is slated to close.

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This is a new measurement of how many candidates in a school achieve good GCSE grades in English, maths, two sciences, a language and either history or geography.

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"It's despite the evidence from Ofsted in March, confirmed by our excellent GCSE results this year, that the school is a good school, providing a good standard of education, " Ms Moore said.

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"The vast majority didn't have a good time at school - so this is showing it can be enjoyable, " says Mr Williams.

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But before getting lost in the fallout it would be useful to take a step back and consider the broader picture, which is how a school with presumably good intentions could get to this point, how its sense of priorities and values could become so skewed it took the public airing of a videotape for people in charge to do the right thing.

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"This is good news, " said Thomas Patterson, a professor of government and the press at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.

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"Nothing would fill me with more worry than an industrial strategy in the old school, but what this does in a splendidly un-Labourite way is share out a series of good ideas which could be adopted by both parties, " he said.

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