In the face of persistent pressure, the city Department of Education has abandoned its insistence that it needed 10 years to remove potentially harmful toxins from light fixtures in hundreds of public schools.

As part of a settlement of a lawsuit filed in 2011, the DOE yesterday agreed to cut the timeline for removing light fixtures containing PCBs by five years.

The expedited work at more than 600 schools, which DOE officials insisted as recently as March couldn’t be done any quicker, sets the new end date at Dec. 31, 2016.