Education officials tried to explain to City Council members at a hearing why they failed to collect tens of millions in reimbursements from services for special-needs students in recent years.

The New York City Education Department has set in motion its plan to restore federal grants to 33 struggling schools. On Tuesday, it released proposals to close eight of those schools, replace half of their staff, then reopen them under new names, all in a bid to bypass a required teacher evaluation system, which should have been in place by Dec. 31.

UPDATED | After a long legal battle and amid much anguish by teachers and other educators, the city Department of Education released individual performance rankings of 18,000 New York City public school teachers to the public on Friday. The rankings are now available on SchoolBook, listed by school.

UPDATED | After an all-night negotiating session in Albany, New York State education officials and the state teachers union reached an agreement on a new teacher evaluation system on Thursday, just hours before a deadline imposed by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, who had threatened to break the impasse by imposing his own way to judge the quality of a teacher’s work.

After three exhaustive weeks of public hearings and protests, the Department of Education has reversed course on two of the 25 schools it had proposed to close or shrink. Wadleigh Secondary School for the Performing and Visual Arts in Harlem, will retain its middle grades. Knowledge and Power Preparatory Academy VII in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, will be spared from closing. The vote on the closings is Thursday.

Of the unions representing teachers and principals in New York City, the principals’ union had played a passive role in the charged and increasingly divisive dispute over an evaluation system to gauge the performance of teachers and principals in 33 struggling schools receiving federal grants to help improve their results. No longer. On Wednesday, the principals’ union president, Ernest A. Logan, sent a strongly worded letter to the state’s education commissioner, John B. King Jr., saying the city’s plan for those 33 schools was simply a ploy to shut out the unions.

State University of New York trustees unanimously approved on Wednesday a resolution supporting a plan to offer state-sponsored tuition assistance, grants and scholarships to college-bound illegal immigrants who want to enroll in state schools.

Testifying in Albany about Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s proposed executive budget, Education Commissioner John B. King Jr. said the Regents would put $200 million of the $250 million the governor set aside for performance grants toward helping poor districts instead.

In the long-simmering debate over how to judge the quality of New York State school employees, there is one thing all sides agree on: a system should be in place. The sticking point has been agreeing about how to do it.

An assessment of education plans and pledges in Mayor Bloomberg’s State of the City addresses through the years.