The Bloomberg administration will revise the report cards that it issues to schools, taking into account some of the changes demanded by parents, teachers, and principals who reacted when the letter grades were first issued in the fall.

Under the new scheme, letter grades would live, and standardized tests would still be the driving force determining them. But, in some significant changes, the new report cards would include more grades, four instead of three for each school, and would make it easier to score high, with special education students getting more credit for their gains and top students seeing no penalty for fluctuating by a few points.

“We’ve said from the moment we released the progress reports that we’d take all that feedback into account in deciding how to improve them,” a Department of Education spokesman, Andrew Jacob, said. “This is just the next step in that process.”

The proposed changes were released to principals in an e-mail Wednesday night. They come after months of criticism delivered by those at A and F schools alike in e-mails, City Council testimony — and, eventually, a series of meetings at the department’s Tweed Courthouse headquarters. The United Federation of Teachers even initiated a commission to create its own alternative grading system, which the UFT president, Randi Weingarten, is scheduled to announce in a major speech before the Association for a Better New York next month.

The new grading scheme would address some criticisms.

Schools would receive four grades: one overall grade, plus three others for each of the report card’s categories — school environment, as represented by surveys of students, teachers, and parents; student performance, as measured by test scores; and student progress, as measured by gains on tests.

Special education students, highlighted as unfairly targeted by in a recent analysis by the teachers union, would also get a leg up. The analysis, first reported in The Daily News, showed that schools with more special education students were less likely to get A’s. The new grades would add a certain set score to every gain made by a special education student, Mr. Jacob said.

The letter to principals said the change would “reflect the additional challenge schools undertake when serving special education students.”

Critics also complained that the report cards put too much emphasis on progress, putting schools where students always score high at a disadvantage. Indeed, several scores where a wide majority of students scored proficiently on tests nevertheless were slapped with D’s and F’s.

That was in part because of a technicality that would change under the new model.

State tests are scaled from 1 to 4, and on the old report cards, a move by one student to a 4.3 from a 4.4 the year before would be counted as a slump. That would no longer happen under the new model; Mr. Jacob said reports would count any student who remains at the 4 level as having improved.

Many of the central elements of the report cards would remain untouched. Standardized reading and math scores would still count for 85% of the report cards. Regents exams for middle schools are the only new measures the city would add to its calculations.

An assistant principal at a Brooklyn middle school that was graded a B, John Galvin, praised some of the changes, such as adding Regents exams and changing the way top scorers are graded.

But Mr. Galvin described the changes as merely “tinkering at the edges.”

“You’re still left in the dark about how it’s going to improve any school,” Mr. Galvin said.

The chair of the anti-testing group Time Out From Testing, Jane Hirschmann, said of the proposal, “It’s like changing deck chairs on the Titanic.”

Ms. Weingarten praised the proposal to add multiple grades as a step in the right direction, but she said the system still needs more work.
The president of the principals’ union, Ernest Logan, praised the proposal, calling it “a step in the right direction.”

The e-mail to principals said the department is still open to suggestions. A final proposal will be released in March, it said.