Fifteen city high schools are being placed on the state’s failing list, while 20 are being taken off, leaving a total of 125 out of 417 eligible high schools in a category they would rather avoid.

The designation is part of the federal No Child Left Behind law, which demands that schools meet rising performance targets every year or be deemed failures and face a sliding scale of consequences, such as being required to develop an improvement plan and, in New York, being shut down.

To avoid the failing list, a certain percentage of students must pass state math and English exams, and every group inside a school, from low-income students to specific racial groups, has to meet the proficiency level.

Among the city schools added to the list this year are several new small schools and at least one large high school, John Dewey in Brooklyn.

A school has to fail to meet standards for two years in a row to be placed on the list. To come off it, a school has to meet standards for two years in a row. Several new small schools were among those removed from the list, as were at least two large schools, Martin Van Buren and Hillcrest high schools in Queens.

The federal system is separate from new report card grades the Bloomberg administration handed out last year. Those grades draw heavily on progress shown on standardized tests, rather than static proficiency levels.

Some of the schools newly placed on the failing list received high grades from the city, such as the Urban Academy Laboratory High School in Manhattan, which got an A, and the Bread & Roses Integrated Arts High School, which got a B. An education department spokesman said city grades, combined with qualitative “quality reviews,” are good predictors of whether a school is on the state’s failing list.