In the face of the state’s suspension last week of federal grants to help improve 33 of New York City’s most troubled schools, the city’s Education Department sent a reassuring message to its principals: stay the course.  In an e-mail sent Friday — after talks between the city and the teachers’ union collapsed over disagreements about an evaluation system for teachers and principals in the struggling schools — Marc Sternberg, a deputy chancellor, and Shael Polakow-Suransky, the city’s chief academic officer, told principals to carry out the plans they had devised to improve their results.  For some, that will mean paying more to keep experienced teachers on staff. For others, it will mean covering the costs of a longer school day.  “Our number one priority is to ensure continuity for students and the continuation of quality programming enabled by this funding,” Mr. Polakow-Suransky and Mr. Sternberg wrote.  But now that the state has suspended payments of the $60 million in federal school improvement grants, it is not at all clear who will foot the bill.  The city has already spent about $40 million on the struggling schools, with the expectation that the state would reimburse it.  State education officials said the money would most likely cover costs incurred until Dec. 31, the day by which New York City and nine other school districts benefiting from the grants were to have put evaluation systems in place. The state’s education commissioner, John B. King Jr., announced on Tuesday that he had suspended the grants to all 10 of those districts. He gave them 30 days to request a hearing to make a case for the money, in effect giving them extra time to reach labor agreements.  While Michael Mulgrew, the president of the city’s teachers’ union, still had hope for a compromise, city officials stood their ground. “Negotiations are over,” Natalie Ravitz, a spokeswoman for the Education Department, said on Tuesday.  The city has reached out to the state to determine whether rules governing the grants might allow the money to be restored some other way. “We’re looking at every available option,” she said.  Principals, meanwhile, have already bought equipment, hired teachers and, in some cases, signed contracts to offer after-school programs.  At John Dewey High School in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, Barry Fried, the principal, said his school still had to pay $500,000 to its external partner, the Institute for Student Achievement, chosen by the city to oversee its progress.  Geraldine Maione said she used the grant to take William E. Grady Career and Technical Education High School in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, to a B from a D on its progress report card. Now that the money has been suspended, she said, “I feel like Moses led us halfway across the desert and then disappeared in the middle of the night.”  Dennis M. Walcott, the city’s schools chancellor, has blamed the United Federation of Teachers’ intransigence for the collapse of the negotiations, writing in an op-ed published in The New York Post on Tuesday that the union “threw away those desperately needed federal dollars because they wanted new job protections for the worst-performing teachers.”  For the union, however, the objections were a matter of fairness. Mr. Mulgrew wants the city to hire independent arbitrators to run the process used by teachers to appeal poor ratings.  A system to judge the performance of teachers and principals is also required by the federal Race to the Top program, a rule that applies to every school district in the state, which is benefiting from the program’s $700 million in education aid. For state and city officials, though, the difficulty in reaching agreements with unions over an evaluation system that would apply to a small number of failing schools is a warning. “If we can’t establish an evaluation model in 33 of the city’s most struggling,” said Ms. Ravitz, “that leaves us feeling not incredibly optimistic for the prospects for the entire system.”
Though the state has suspended $60 million from the federal government to pay for programs already under way at troubled schools, those schools have been told to forge ahead.