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• A D.C. agency will investigate if it’s legal for foundations to revoke donations if Rhee leaves office.
• P.S. 41 students and parents protested steep school budget cuts.
• Jacques Cousteau’s grandson will help students at the Harbor School plant oysters in the Hudson.
• Many states, like New York, give partial credit for wrong answers on state exams, Linda Perlstein reports.
• State Sen. Jeffrey Klein is striking back against a UFT ad campaign criticizing his plan to cut ed funding.
• The number of black students in Dallas public schools has declined rapidly in the past decade.
• The Chicago teachers union is suing the city over its plan to increase class size to 35.
• Obama’s Race to the Top commencement speech tonight will emphasize personal responsibility.
• As a Clinton advisor, Elena Kagan advised against pressuring Rudy Crew into opening all-boys schools.
• Education Next looks at why the National Spelling Bee is getting more competitive.
• Florida districts may have won union support for its Race to the Top application by striking side deals.

Was the State University of New York’s ability to approve and oversee charter schools truly at risk during last month’s charter school cap debate? The lead vignette of today’s Times profile of city lobbyist Micah Lasher suggests that it was:

Just when Micah C. Lasher thought it was safe to finally sleep one recent morning, three words appeared in his in-box: “It’s a sham.”

Mr. Lasher had stayed up all night helping write a bill to increase the number of charter schools in New York, a cornerstone of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s education agenda. But amid the frenzy, a highly contentious provision had slipped by him: the State University of New York would lose its power to approve charter schools.

If SUNY’s Charter School Institute really was only saved during a middle-of-the-night wrangling, that could be a bad sign for the organization’s future: the Institute is currently facing budget cuts that might gut its operations.

But all of our information suggests that lawmakers supported keeping SUNY’s ability to oversee charters. The provision that could have revoked SUNY’s chartering authority was the result of a manic bill drafting process and late-night fatigue, not an attack on the widely-praised charter school overseers. (more…)

Warning that the city’s cuts to public schools will “eradicate just about every service and program out there,” teachers union president Michael Mulgrew called for deeper cuts to the education bureaucracy today.

Mulgrew testified on the planned four percent cuts to schools citywide, but mainly focused his comments on what he called “unchecked” spending by the Department of Education on everything but schools. This includes criticism of the DOE for increasing the number of deputy chancellors and giving salary increases to those people, re-categorizing positions instead of eliminating them, and taking credit for cutting more administrative positions than they really did.

While the DOE has increased the number of deputy chancellors and their paychecks, Mulgrew’s explanation of the personnel cuts is wanting. (more…)

Having narrowly escaped laying off more than 4,000 teachers — at least for now — Chancellor Joel Klein is permitting some principals to hire new ones.

Hiring rules posted today on the Department of Education’s website continue, and in some cases tighten, restrictions that have been in place since May 2009. Under the new rules, schools that opened in 2008 or later can hire up to 40 percent of their new teachers from outside the system. Last year, new schools could look outside the system for 50 percent their hires.

Unlike last year, new schools are barred from hiring elementary school classroom teachers who don’t already work in the system. And the exemption granted for science teachers in the past is no longer in place; only a tiny number of license areas are free of restrictions, such as special education and Spanish bilingual education.

Anticipating that principals are likely to cut assistant principal positions this year to meet their slimmed down budgets, the city is also requiring that all schools hire assistant principals from the excess pool. Last year, as in previous years, principals could hire assistant principals from inside and outside the system.

Prospective teachers have only until the end of the month to apply to teach. The rules posted today, which could change as the system’s staffing needs become clearer, are listed below. (more…)

• Micah Lasher, Bloomberg’s chief negotiator, turned down his job three times to stay at the DOE. (Times)
• Grading guides for the state math test give partial credit for major arithmetic errors. (Post)
• Sentiment is growing for Orthodox Jewish schools to accept more children with special needs. (NY1)
• A $600 million federal health care budget cut could put teacher layoffs back on the table. (Daily News)
• Some of the politicians who oppose charter schools are trying to help a private school. (Post)
• The teachers union is suing the city over large class sizes at Francis Lewis HS. (Queens Tribune)
• Parents at three Manhattan schools aided by a space-sharing plan say fighting back works. (NY1) 
• The Daily News is worried that despite legislative changes, New York still won’t win Race to the Top.
• The Post praises N.J. Gov. Chris Christie for reneging on the state’s deal with the its teachers union.
• High schools are suffering nationally as they eliminate many non-essential programs. (USA Today)
• Bay Area educators led the fight in California against the Race to the Top competition. (Times)
• Jay Mathews says D.C.’s new contract clears the way for teachers’s creativity. (Washington Post)

• Michael Mulgrew tells City Hall that he credits the New York Post with his big 91% election win.
• The DOE is sending out gifted and talented placements today, Insideschools reports.
• This profile of Eric Nadelstern calls him a “possible Klein successor,” but says little else.
• What does it mean for a fist bump to fall out of consuetude? Spelling bee semifinalists found out.
• Twenty-three states changed their laws to win the hearts of RTTT judges, says USDOE, in a memo.
• The Hechinger Report considers what’s new about the latest national standards effort.
• A new finding from Chicago shows a federally funded merit pay project produced no learning gains.
• Aldeman reviews two new merit-pay studies: So far Denver’s is helping students, Chicago’s isn’t.
• What would happen if really bad teachers got fired more often? North Carolina researchers imagine.
• A South Bronx teacher explains the “intervisitation club” and “learning walks” his school is trying.
• And how to build a garden at your school, from our Community contributors.

When the state announced plans to push back the date of the annual tests, some teachers and administrators bristled. But now the change is complicating a rite of passage: figuring out which students are promoted to the next grade and which are going to summer school.

This year’s delayed testing schedule puts New York City in the awkward position of choosing which students to send to summer school without knowing whether they passed the state’s annual math and English exams. Currently, schools have their students’ raw test scores, but they don’t know whether the scale score passes the official state cut-off for passing, because the state hasn’t set cut-off scores yet.

In response, the city is working with the state to set their own cutoff scores months before the official results come out in August. (more…)