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Rejoice is turning to concern about funding at schools newly spared from an aggressive overhaul process.

The seven schools — all with top grades on the city’s performance metrics — pulled from the Department of Education’s “turnaround” roster on Monday were positioned to receive about $15 million in federal School Improvement Grants next year.

Being taken off the turnaround list means the schools won’t have to replace half of their teachers, lose their names, or get new principals. But it also means that they might not receive the funds: A letter distributed by the Department of Education to students at the schools on Tuesday states, ”We regret that this [change] may result in the loss of federal resources for your school.”

The funds could make the difference between continued improvement and backsliding for the schools.

Five of the seven schools had received SIG funds in 2010 and 2011, enabling them to pay for enhancements that their principals said led to quick improvements. At Brooklyn’s School of Global Studies, nearly $1 million received under “transformation” allowed the school to buy new technology and hire expert teachers. William E. Grady Career and Technical High School paid for tutoring, college trips, an extended program, and Saturday school for students who had fallen behind. Both schools scored B’s on their most recent city progress reports after years of low grades.

“If we don’t get the money we wont be able to finish what we started,” Geraldine Maione, Grady’s principal, said this week. “We started out on the premise that we were getting this money for three years because that is what we were told.” (more…)

Mayor Bloomberg and UFT President Randi Weingarten announced a tentative contract deal last night, just in time for Weingarten’s announcement Wednesday. The agreement would roll back pension benefits for newly hired employees, but preserve benefits for current teachers. It would also scrap the two work days before Labor Day that were added to the work year in the last contract negotiation.

Not mentioned in either Bloomberg’s press release or Weingarten’s e-mail to teachers (sent late last night and obtained thanks to a helpful reader): the small matter of the $81 million-a-year Absent Teacher Reserve. That’s the pool of teachers who are the losers in the system’s new hiring market — but haven’t been able to find positions at schools.

The union and the city struck a deal to try to drain the pool in November, but the number of reserve teachers stayed basically the same.

This appears to be Weingarten’s penultimate loose end before she leaves the city to work at the national teachers union full-time. The final deal she must announce: A contract agreement with the union-represented Green Dot charter school in the Bronx, which officials are unveiling this afternoon.

Here’s how Weingarten described the new citywide labor agreement in an e-mail to teachers, followed by Bloomberg’s press release: (more…)

The Brooklyn KIPP school I’ve been focusing on isn’t the only KIPP school likely to get its first-ever labor contract, courtesy of the United Federation of Teachers. The teachers union is also pushing to negotiate a labor contract on behalf of teachers at KIPP Infinity, a middle school that got one of two of the highest grades in the city on the Department of Education’s progress reports last school year.

While the teachers at KIPP AMP in Brooklyn asked to be represented by the union, the teachers at KIPP Infinity are in a different situation. Randi Weingarten, the president of the union, told me on the phone today that the union has represented Infinity’s teachers for a while, as part of a deal through which the union provided them with health benefits through something called a “welfare fund.” (Not sure what that is.) But the union’s relationship with Infinity did not extend into the more confrontational territory of helping the teachers develop a labor contract.

Today, the union’s secretary, Michael Mendel, informed Infinity’s board members that the union wants to go there and negotiate a labor contract. Here’s the letter he wrote explaining the union’s intentions. What I’m not clear on is what sparked the union to push for a contract at Infinity: Did teachers ask for this, or was it a separate push by the union?