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The Campaign for Fiscal Equity, the advocacy organization whose historic, years-long lawsuit brought increased funding to the New York City schools, is closing its doors — at least in its current format, The New York Times reported this afternoon.

The organization’s last employee, Executive Director Helaine Doran, will leave at the end of the month because the group has run out of funding, the Times reports.

The development comes despite the fact that the dollars won by the group’s lawsuit have fallen far short of what was promised in a settlement between the group and the state in 2007.

The Times is right to describe the development as part of a greater shift in the way that philanthropists think about education advocacy, one that has made groups like former D.C. schools chancellor Michelle Rhee’s Students First active in New York City while the Campaign for Fiscal Equity struggled. The old mantra was that urban districts failed because they have been historically under-funded; now, advocates are more likely to argue that funding is necessary but not sufficient. (Another budget watchdog, the Educational Priorities Panel, dissolved in 2007, also due to a loss of funding.)

But it’s also possible that the dissolution of CFE could actually signal a renaissance of its original efforts: litigation aimed at forcing New York to spend more on needy school districts. (more…)

When the school year came to a close at 11:30 a.m. today, so too did the city’s infamous “rubber rooms,” the reassignment centers for teachers the city says are unfit for the classroom.

Like all teachers, teachers awaiting trial on misconduct or incompetence charges don’t have to work over the summer. Because of a deal the city and teachers union struck in April, those whose cases are still pending at the end of the summer will report for duty Sept. 7 not to a rubber room but to a school or district office, where they will do administrative work. In the past, teachers who finished the school year in a rubber room would begin the next one still languishing there.

United Federation of Teachers President Michael Mulgrew said today that the city had begun to make headway on its promise to clear the backlog of cases against teachers by December. In April, there were about 650 cases open against teachers.

“Cases are moving much faster now that they have agreed to actually follow the timelines,” Mulgrew said. “They’re surveying all the cases, which they really were not doing, and they’re saying this is ridiculous, this is ridiculous. They’re clearing a lot just by going through each and every one. … The numbers are dropping quickly.”

The city estimated it was spending about $30 million annually to pay teachers to sit in rubber rooms, which had drawn ridicule from the New Yorker magazine and even provided a storyline for the final episode of the television series “Law and Order.”