The Panel for Educational Policy heard from school communities who opposed the plan to shutter 24 schools. Many of the comments were directed at Mayor Bloomberg and his decade-long policy of closing failing schools.

The Panel for Educational Policy is certain to approve proposals to close 22 more schools at its Monday night vote. And there’s reason to believe more closures will come before the end of Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s term.

A new report finds higher concentrations of students in poverty and special needs at the 26 schools the city has targeted for closure, but it doesn’t draw any conclusions about whether the schools received enough funds to prevent them from going downhill academically.

A K-12 charter school run by the teachers’ union will find out Tuesday if all or some of it can remain open. The latest review cited numerous problems including low student achievement, poor fiscal health and a few cases of corporal punishment.

Another two dozen Catholic schools will close by the end of the school year. Wall Street Journal reporter Lisa Fleischer says the archdiocese hopes it’s the last wave of closures in the consolidation that has shuttered more than 50 Catholic schools in the last two years.

While the city’s education department proposed to close or shrink 26 more public schools this year it’s noteworthy that there were no charters on the list. Some critics of the Bloomberg administration claim charter schools are hard to close because the mayor is so heavily invested in their success; others argue that legal obstacles and confusing criteria create a double standard when it comes to closing low-performing charter schools.

The Department of Education named seven more schools it will seek to close when the Panel for Educational Policy meets in March. That leaves 32 schools still open for business that were under scrutiny. The D.O.E. said it would consider a range of “interventions” to help these struggling schools improve.

The first list is out for this year’s proposed school closings. It includes six schools in Brooklyn, five in the Bronx, four in Manhattan and two in Queens. Of the 17 schools proposed for phase out or closure, six received grades of F, nine received a D, and two received their third C grade in a row.

Schools on the city’s “early engagement” list have finished up their meetings with education officials. They now wait to see which schools the Education Department will propose for phase-out. SchoolBook spent time at the Juan Morel Campos Secondary School which is facing possible closure for the second year in a row.

More city high schools got A’s and B’s on their annual report cards, and fewer got failing grades. These progress reports looked at student performance and school environment but this year they also looked at how well each school prepared its students for college and career, based on the courses they took and their test scores.