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Last week, I reported that the city’s charter school sector was on the verge of releasing a trove of data about its schools. I began my reporting after I learned about the plan in February, and a week ago, I learned that the organization in charge of the report had big plans for the report’s release.

The organization, the New York City Charter School Center, sent an advisory a week ago announcing Monday as the big day and inviting reporters to an 11 a.m. press conference to learn about the report, which would compile data about the schools’ performance and their students. But those plans were scrapped over the weekend.

On Sunday afternoon a spokeswoman for the charter school center emailed to say that the “State of the Sector” report was being delayed because all of the data had not been verified.

Now, four days after the promised release, the report is still not out. The spokeswoman, Kerri Lyon, said the report would now come “within a few weeks” and that the center would release the overview report at the same time as it publishes individual school-level data online.

The delay is a surprise because a 12-person committee made up of charter school operators led by the center’s policy director, Michael Regnier, was already charged with verifying the data in the report. Lyon said Thursday that charter schools were now validating some of the data about their own schools before the report’s release. (more…)

A few weeks ago, we reported that a KIPP charter school was threatening to fire most of its teachers in an effort to turn the school around. Today, I caught up with one of the teachers, who said that worries about a mass-firing have been calmed by a new principal’s arrival.

According to the teacher, who asked to be anonymous in order to protect her job, teacher morale has improved at the KIPP AMP (Knowledge is Power Program: Always Mentally Prepared) school in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Several weeks ago, dispirited teachers said that the majority of their colleagues had been told that they would not have jobs next year.

But since then the school’s new principal, Debon Lewis, has told the staff that he’s looking to improve the staff rather than replace it entirely.

“Now that Debon is stepping up and playing a more active role as a leader people are feeling more comfortable,” the teacher said. “The impression that I get is that people who want to stay are hustling and doing what they have to do to improve.”

Two years ago, concerns about teacher turnover were the driving force behind KIPP AMP teachers’ decision to join the teachers union against the will of the school’s board. A year later teachers opted out of union membership, kicking off a prolonged fight in which the United Federation of Teachers accused KIPP of intimidating teachers who wanted to unionize. (more…)