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A gamble that the city took back in October did not pay off this week when the state announced which districts would receive extra funds to pay for teacher training.

The city had applied for the funds, part of the state’s Race to the Top winnings, back in October. But it came up short on one crucial requirement of the application: demonstrating that the teachers union agreed that new teacher evaluations would be in place this year.

At the time, the UFT and city had hashed out a tentative teacher evaluation deal for the 33 schools that were receiving federal School  Improvement Grants, but their relations were growing more tense. Here’s what we reported at the time:

The decaying union-city relations could help explain why, when it submitted a bid last week for teacher training funds, the Department of Education asked for its share of Race to the Top funds to go only to schools included in the limited evaluation deal. …

It’s unclear whether the state would approve the city’s funding bids without the [union] memorandums in place. If the city’s application is turned down, the funds would be dispersed among other districts, according to Race to the Top rules. (more…)

The Bronx charter school accused of rigging its admissions procedures to admit successful students has been put on probation.

The news, reported today in the New York Times, comes after Anna Phillips broke the story on GothamSchools in May that teachers and parents at Academic Leadership Charter School said the school tests students for admission. State law mandates that charter schools admit students through a lottery.

The testing allegations weren’t borne out in the city’s investigation, possibly because city officials did not speak to staff members who had resigned or parents of students who were not admitted, Phillips now reports for the Times. But investigators still found more than enough improprieties to warrant putting the school on probation.

Phillips writes:

… city officials found that at Academic Leadership, which has about 200 children in kindergarten through second grade, hundreds of applicants were left out of this year’s drawing. The lottery was supervised not by an impartial observer, but by a member of the parent association, the letter said. And while students who applied after the lottery should have been added to the waiting list, scores of them were not, it said.

Academic Leadership is the first charter school in the city to be disciplined for breaking admissions rules, Phillips reports. Recy Dunn, head of the city Department of Education’s charter schools office, wrote in a letter that the school suffered from “a pattern of failed operational oversight by school leadership” that extended well beyond admissions procedures.

Beleaguered Lehman High School could be getting a new principal, just three years after the city gave Janet Saraceno a $25,000 bonus to take the job, the New York Times is reporting.

As a GothamSchools reporter, Anna Phillips broke the story that Saraceno was accused of padding students’ transcripts with courses they didn’t take and grades they didn’t earn. A city investigation followed. Now that she’s reporting for the New York Times, Phillips is continuing to follow the Lehman story, and today’s update is that Saraceno won’t return to Lehman this fall.

Phillips writes that faculty and staff lobbied against Saraceno in an unsigned letter sent to news organizations last month:

The letter, which was not signed, criticized Dr. Saraceno for being “highly unapproachable” and rarely visiting teachers’ classrooms or observing their lessons.

“Perhaps the most egregious example of Dr. Saraceno’s gross negligence is her advocacy for a weak and poorly executed credit recovery program,” the letter states.

“On several occasions Dr. Saraceno has requested, via her assistant principals, that teachers get on board with grade changes simply because we cannot have students not graduate,” the letter says.

A spokeswoman for the principals union told me that the union could not confirm Saraceno’s departure. “We’ve heard that she might leave, but it’s hearsay,” said the spokeswoman, Chiara Coletti. “She’s a very good principal who was put into a school culture very different from the one she came from, and that can’t be easy.”