At a hearing on the cost of transporting students to school, City Council members pleaded with Chancellor Dennis Walcott to do what he could to to end the school bus strike. Thousands of students have been without yellow bus service since the strike began on Jan. 16. He stuck to the city’s position that there is nothing it can do to resolve the standoff.

With time running out, the Bloomberg administration and the teachers union have cleared their schedules to continue negotiations on getting a teacher evaluation deal in place by the state’s deadline of next Thursday.

As the city tries to decrease its student suspension rate with a revised discipline code, Christine Quinn, the city council speaker, urges the Department of Education to consider even more measures to keep students in school.

Unions representing the teachers and principals went to court to block the city from letting go of any staff members at the 24 schools it plans to close and reopen this fall. They accuse the city of violating their contractual rights to due process.

The $190,806-a-year executive director of the Department of Education’s finance division was forced to resign Tuesday after a city investigation found that he had arranged for his wife to be hired for an Education Department job with a $52,000 salary.

The Panel for Education Policy voted to allow a Success Academy charter school’s opening in the fall inside of a Williamsburg middle school; parents in the Bronx are worried about overcrowding; and the mayor and schools chancellor are speaking this morning on a panel about education reform.

Chancellor Dennis M. Walcott has expressed reluctance about releasing thousands of individual teacher ratings to the public, striking a different tone if not a different outcome from that of his predecessor, Joel I. Klein, who paved the way for their release.

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.

Speaking in Washington at a meeting of the United States Conference of Mayors Thursday, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg called on the teachers’ union to stop blocking a new system of evaluations.

The city and the teachers union remain in a stalemate over a system to evaluate teachers in the city’s struggling schools. While state officials say there’s still time for them to reverse their decision, $60 million in federal aid to those schools remains on hold.