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“Everything you ever do, there’s going to be days where it just doesn’t work,” Mayor Bloomberg told a group of high school students today. “There’s going to be days where somebody says something you don’t like or something goes the wrong way.”

Bloomberg’s message to an 11th-grade English class was meant to inspire students for the future. But it could have just as easily been a self-esteem booster as he slogs through a battle over teacher quality that he started waging when he became mayor 10 years ago.

“Successful people,” Bloomberg told the students about adversity, “recover from that and they learn how to deal with that.”

The visit to the Urban Assembly School for Applied Math and Science was the mayor’s latest stop on a publicity tour to promote a strategy to retain effective teachers and fire the least effective ones. It began in the Bronx last week, at the Morris High School Campus with his State of the City Speech, and continued into this week with a speech on Martin Luther King Day.

In the process, he has picked up substantial support from state officials. Yesterday, both Gov. Andrew Cuomo and State Education Commissioner John King demanded that the state teachers union, NYSUT, drop a lawsuit challenging the state’s teacher evaluation law. King also backed Bloomberg’s plan to win back suspended federal funds by removing teachers at 33 low-performing schools through a process called “turnaround.” (more…)

After the collapse of teacher evaluation negotiations in New York City and across the state, education reform groups are asking Gov. Andrew Cuomo to install a “shot clock” on future talks.

When the clock expires, a teacher evaluation system devised by the State Education Department would go into effect, according to the plan outlined in a letter signed by 13 reform organizations from across the state and country. The groups — which include Democrats for Education Reform and and StudentsFirst, Michelle Rhee’s new lobbying outfit — argue both that more stringent evaluations are needed and that the state cannot afford to leave funding on the table during tough budget times.

The state’s teacher evaluation law, passed in 2010in order to secure Race to the Top funding, requires districts to adopt tougher evaluations when they renegotiate teachers contracts. But if they want to draw on several pools of federal funds, they have to finalize the new evaluations sooner. Dec. 31 was the deadline for one set of funds, School Improvement Grants. Another deadline, for Race to the Top funds, is coming on June 30.

Now the reform groups want the state to set another deadline — Aug. 31 — and they want it to apply to all districts, not just ones seeking federal funding. The groups are suggesting to Cuomo that districts that haven’t negotiated a plan by then would have to adopt a “default” plan and put it in place by the following year. (more…)

As the city heads into summer, where exactly this fall’s crop of new charter schools will open remains in limbo. But that doesn’t mean more schools aren’t planned for the future.

Earlier this month, SUNY’s Charter Schools Institute approved a dozen charter schools to open in the city in the fall of 2012. Each of the new schools is planned for a specific school district within the city, but the institute’s announcement gives no indication of whether the schools will pursue public or private space.

The new schools include some unusual arrangements for the city, such as a partnership school with the Children’s Aid Society that will provide social services to students and a school that will reserve 30 percent of seats for students for English language learners. That school is set to open in Elmhurst, Queens, and has as a partner a nonprofit that works with Asian immigrants.

But the list mostly contains schools that replicate models already in place in the city. The sixth and seventh Carl Icahn charter schools are on the list, as are a second Family Life Academy Charter School and a second Manhattan Charter School. The Explore network has been given the green light for another school that would give preference to students zoned for a school the city wants to close; the first is supposed to open this fall, although the lawsuit filed by the UFT and NAACP has thrown that plan into question.

And the Success Charter Network, which already operates seven schools and is set to open two more this fall, had three new schools approved, all for Brooklyn. (more…)

Graduation data for students who entered high school in 2004 will be released today, the State Education Department has announced.

The city will announce that its graduation rate jumped four points, according to the New York Post. A gain of that magnitude would outstrip the increases of the last few years and would bring the city’s official graduation rate to 56 percent.

City officials were hinting at an increase last week: Schools Chancellor Joel Klein told an audience that he had looked at internal third- and fourth-year data for many of the city’s new small high schools and seen continued gains. “The results are consistently higher,” he said, adding that the rate was continuing to inch upward at large high schools as well.

Asked about graduation rate and dropout trends, the department’s data czar Jennifer Bell-Ellwanger told the City Council on Thursday, “We certainly expect rates to rise and everything else to go down.” (more…)