Educators now can choose from a city-approved list when buying materials that adhere to the Common Core standards in math and English. Schools won’t get the new materials until September though, months after students take the first Common Core-aligned exams.

A frank assessment of the Bloomberg legacy and what awaits the next mayor were the highlights of a breakfast panel hosted by City & State and SchoolBook. You can hear it here.

As the city expands its special education reforms across the city, the new policy has run into a few speed bumps. Families and schools are struggling to understand and meet the requirement that neighborhood schools serve almost all the students in its community even if that means adding staff and providing services the school has never provided before.

Speaking on WNYC, the city’s chief academic officer, Shael Polakow-Suransky, said the city was opening its hot line this week for parents of special education students ahead of this fall’s overhaul of special education programs. Listen to the conversation, and share your comments.

The city is proposing to give a small number of students who have been held back at least once a chance of moving ahead to the next grade if they fail their state exams again this summer. But the students’ principals will have to prove they are making progress on at least two measures of performance.

More than 5,000 New York City teachers have been assigned to score the state math and reading exams. The work happens at several sites around the city during the school day, which means students are without their regular classroom teachers for several days at a time.

In an effort to expand the introduction of a new set of learning standards into the city’s public schools, officials are asking science and social studies teachers to introduce more reading and writing into students’ classwork. This school year, English and math teachers have already begun to adapt their lessons to the new requirements.

School progress reports, standardized testing and legal battles over private school tuition were all in the news over the weekend, with Michael Winerip comparing two South Bronx schools, Gail Collins examining “A Very Pricey Pineapple,” and Jenny Anderson looking at what happened when some parents tried to withdraw their child from private school.

At a bit before midnight, more than three months after the idea was first proposed, the Panel for Educational Policy voted to reconstitute two dozen city schools by closing them, replacing most of their staff members and reopening them with new names. The vote was the end of a prolonged process, a day of drama and a very long, emotional night.

The president of the principals’ union makes a case to save Bushwick Community High School, a transfer high school that is slated to be closed. Ernest Logan writes: “Not one student I encountered on my recent visit could figure out how losing their principal, teachers and cherished school name was going to help them.”