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The BetterLesson profile for sixth-grade Roxbury Prep Charter School teacher and BetterLesson celebrity Jason Armstrong

The most popular member of a new social network is neither Lady Gaga nor Ashton Kutcher, though Kutcher is a fan of the website.

The distinction goes to Jason Armstrong, a sixth-grade teacher in Roxbury, Mass., who has more than 6,500 total views and more than 1,100 downloads on a new website for teachers called BetterLesson.

BetterLesson’s circle of about 7,000 teachers are downloading Armstrong’s math lessons, grouped into six units: whole numbers, decimals, fractions, percents, geometry, and a year-ender called extensions and review. They can also download his quizzes and tests and become his “colleague” (the equivalent of a Facebook friend).

Armstrong’s former colleague and roommate, Alex Grodd, created the site — which Kutcher recently promoted in a Tweet, a stroke of generosity devised by a BetterLesson staffer. Grodd first came up with the idea for the site when he joined Teach for America in 2004.

Assigned to teach third grade science during his summer institute training at a Houston elementary school, Grodd went online to hunt for ideas. Surely one of the other hundreds of third grade science teachers in the world had come up with a smart way to explain his assigned topic, the solar system. Why should he have to reinvent the pedagogical wheel? The last remotely relevant class he’d taken was Harvard’s notoriously science-light “Natural Disasters.”

Hours of Googling later, Grodd came up with nothing. “This was 2004, it wasn’t, like, 1994,” Grodd told me today. “The Internet had been around for a while.”

BetterLesson is not the first attempt to solve the problem of teacher isolation, but it’s already catching on more quickly than many efforts. Those 7,000 users are up from just 200 in June 2009, when the site launched to a small group, and Grodd won backing from NewSchools Venture Fund, the philanthropically financed new-idea incubator. (more…)

The city has told nearly 20 prospective charter school leaders who originally asked the city for charters that they need to start the process over with the state.

The move begins to fill in the hazy picture of how the city’s role in granting and overseeing charters is changing as a result of charter school legislation passed in May. It suggests that the city might be losing some of its autonomy in authorizing charters, but still plans to stay involved in the chartering process.

The new law doubled the number of charters allowed in the state. It also created some confusion over just who gets to authorize new charters. Under the old law, the city was one of three authorizers. But the new legislation names only the Board of Regents and the State University of New York as authorizers. Yet it also mentions the chancellor as a “charter entity,” without making clear what that means.

Caught in the middle of the confusion were 19 charter school applicants who submitted their applications to the city in early May, just weeks before Albany overhauled the law and after the city had already hit its charter cap. (more…)

• Two romantically involved officials were found to have spied on principals. (Daily News, Post, NY1)
• The city will add a college readiness metric to next year’s progress reports. (GothamSchools, Daily News)
• Greenwich Village Middle School, which is moving, discarded dozens of apparently good desks. (Post)
• Students who got cash rewards for AP scores say they were motivated even without the incentives. (NY1)
• The Refugee Summer Youth Academy aims to acclimate new refugees to New York City schools. (AP)
• The head of Hunter College High School weighs in on the school’s diversity dissent in a letter. (Times)
• A federal court ruled that schools can ignore those who deny the Armenian genocide. (Boston Globe)

• Report: Young teachers favor differentiated pay, but don’t think test scores can do it. (via Claus)
• A 12th grade teacher finds a way to teach her students to have democratic debate. (ASCD)
• Another film will take on the U.S. school system — a drama starring Adrien Brody. (Cinema Blend)
• No, desegregation as a school reform won’t go gently into that good night. (Hechinger)
• Meanwhile, Dilbert does a pretty good job telling part of the story in a cartoon. (via NYCPSPB)
• An argument that “most evidence points toward great instructors being born, not made.” (Slate)
• Andrew Cuomo will go to Charlie Rangel’s birthday party. Probably both senators too. (WNYC)
• A teacher’s dream list of the school supplies if cash were unlimited. (Flowers and Sausages)
• A list of the 10 non-Gates/Buffett billionaires who have donated most to charity. (The Street)

City schools are learning more about how their graduates fare in college. But parents aren’t getting the new reports, at least for now.

That’s because the city knows how only a small fraction of graduates perform in college and doesn’t want to suggest it has complete information about how well schools prepare their graduates.

A data-sharing agreement between the City University of New York and the Department of Education means the city knows more than it ever has about high school graduates enrolled at CUNY schools. But they make up only half of all college-bound graduates, who in turn represent just 60 percent of high school students.

The new reports explain whether graduates who enroll in CUNY colleges need to take remedial classes and whether they stay enrolled. But they don’t say anything about the 42 percent of graduates who go to private colleges and colleges outside of the city. And they also leave out the one-third of graduates who don’t go to college at all.

Without that information, the reports aren’t terribly useful for parents trying to figure out how well schools prepare students for college, and they could give inaccurate impressions of how well schools compare to each other, said Shael Polakow-Suransky, the deputy chancellor in charge of accountability.

“You could have really misleading information if you try to make a comparison [between schools], because there are variables missing,” he said. (more…)

Teaching jobs in the Bronx have been so slow to fill that the city today released many from year-old hiring restrictions.

The Department of Education informed Bronx principals this morning that they are now free to hire English, chemistry, math, social studies, and science teachers from outside the current teaching corps. In other boroughs, a hiring freeze in place since May 2009 require principals to fill most vacancies with teachers who are already working in the system.

When Ramon Gonzalez, the principal of MS 223 in the South Bronx, heard about the change, he snapped up four teachers in six minutes.

Gonzalez said he had been holding off on hiring from within the system because none of the 40 teachers he had interviewed met MS 223′s exacting standards. Plus, he already had four strong candidates ready to sign on with the school the moment he could offer them jobs.

Two of the English and social studies teachers had worked in temporary positions at MS 223 last year, one as a substitute and the other as an intern. Another wanted to move to a city school from the suburbs. And the last was coming off a stint as teacher trainer at Teachers College. Gonzalez had been stringing them along all summer, even offering them part-time work in hopes that they’d wait out the hiring freeze.

Gonzalez knew that if he lost out on the four teachers, he wouldn’t be able to find others. (more…)

• The private program that pays students for passing AP tests is short on cash. (Daily News)
• The Observer praises Joel Klein’s citation of emergency powers to let a charter school expand.
• The College Board plans to do away with penalties for guessing on its tests. (USA Today)
• Across the country, the move toward healthier, more sustainable school lunches continues. (USA Today)
• Denver’s former superintendent, Michael Bennet, survived a primary challenge as senator. (Times)

• One teacher’s falling test scores make her thankful, and vow to work harder. (Year Seven)
• A new jobs site from The After School Corporation helps educators find work. (Insideschools)
• There’s no conspiracy to privatize in the business-minded schooling trend. (Larry Cuban)
• A push to train principals according to the ages of children they work with. (Early Ed Watch)
• Formative vs. summative tests? One’s a checkup, the other an autopsy. (Ed News Colorado)
• KIPP’s summit included galas, awards, and young scholars. (Vimeo)
• New Jersey is tightening its pre-K rules and focusing on poor families. (Hechinger)
• A political opponent of Michael Bennet’s pitched that Times story. (Politico)
• Arne Duncan will get the edujobs money out as fast as he can. (Politics K12, GS)
• The definitive difference between apples and oranges: a cartoon explainer. (Kids Are Dumb)

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President Barack Obama is expected to sign a $10 billion federal teacher jobs bill into law this evening, opening the way for New York City to receive about $200 million for teacher salaries.

The “edujobs” legislation is meant to stave off teacher layoffs. But in New York City, Mayor Michael Bloomberg avoided layoffs by revoking planned teacher pay raises, leaving the use of the $200 million unclear. The law requires that districts use the funds to pay for teachers salaries and benefits — not any administrative costs.

One possibility is that pay raises could go back on the negotiating table. The money could also be used to prevent the elimination of 2,000 teaching positions that the city is still planning to lose this year through attrition and not replace.

Overall, New York State will receive an estimated $622 million. Districts will have until September 2012 to use the funds.

Speaking to reporters this afternoon after the bill passed the House, U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan said that states could see the influx of money in a matter of weeks. “We feel a huge sense of urgency here,” Duncan said.

The bill passed after months of Congressional wrangling. Last month, it faced the threat of a presidential veto after lawmakers wanted to pay for the measure by cutting funds originally meant for Obama administration education reform efforts, including Race to the Top. The final version is paid for by other budget trades, including a $12 billion cut to the federal food stamp program.