With $58 million in federal grant money still in suspension until the city can reach a deal on a teacher evaluation system for its struggling schools, The New York Times on Friday takes a closeup look at one school’s financial plight.

Fernanda Santos reports on Chelsea Career and Technical Education High School in Soho, where the principal, Brian Rosenbloom, had made strategic decisions about how to spend $1 million in school improvement grant money.

Since the grant money began flowing into Chelsea High in the last school year — part of a $4 billion effort by the Obama administration to improve the country’s most troubled schools — Mr. Rosenbloom has focused on what he views as sustainable improvements. He has bought dozens of desktop computers, laptops for most of his 500 students, books for classroom libraries and the air-conditioners. He has invested in training for teachers, a summer program for struggling students and Advanced Placement courses.

The money was supposed to last three years. For most of the schools, the city has agreed to pay what was promised, and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has also come up with a workaround plan for the teacher evaluation system standoff.

In his State of the City address, the mayor proposed an unorthodox arrangement. The city would close most of the schools and reopen them with new names and numbers next fall, replacing half the teachers. The effect would be similar to having an evaluation system in place, by identifying and clearing out bad teachers. That would be enough to get the grants restored, he said.

But Chelsea High is a special case. It is one of the two schools, out of the 33 receiving the federal money, where the city has decided not to intervene, because it seemed to be improving on its own. (The other is Boys and Girls High School in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn.) And because of that, it probably will not qualify for the grant money next year.

“It’s not like the money is being wasted,” Mr. Rosenbloom said, “and the statistics prove it.”

SchoolBook’s focus is on grades K-12, but many parents will be happy to hear that the Obama administration is making new proposals related to college affordability, Tamar Lewin writes in Friday’s Times.

Under the plan, which the president is expected to outline on Friday morning in a speech at the University of Michigan, the amount available for Perkins loans would grow to $8 billion, from the current $1 billion. The president also wants to create a $1 billion grant competition, along the lines of the Race for the Top program for elementary and secondary education, to reward states that take action to keep college costs down, and a separate $55 million competition for individual colleges to increase their value and efficiency.

The administration also wants to give families clearer information about costs and quality, by requiring colleges and universities to offer a “shopping sheet” that makes it easier to compare financial aid packages and — for the first time — compiling post-graduate earning and employment information to give students a better sense of what awaits them.

Here’s the rub: all of these proposals require Congressional approval. And we all know how that’s been going lately.

In a post in the New York Public School Parents blog, Leonie Haimson of Class Size Matters provides her own analysis of the MRDC study that found that the city’s small high schools are graduating more students — with more rigorous diplomas — than the remaining large high schools. Among her arguments: fewer high needs students attend the small high schools, students could have been helped by credit recovery and other manipulation of results, and small school students benefit from smaller classes.

And a SchoolBook user, Lara Paul, posted a query on the SchoolBook page for Teachers College Community School in East Harlem, asking for information about the new school. That’s what SchoolBook’s school pages are for: as places to get and share information about each of the 2,500 schools in the city. Won’t someone go to the page and respond to her query in the “Start a Conversation” box?

The principal of Teachers College Community School also has not yet provided answers to SchoolBook’s principals survey, which allows principals to describe their schools to interested community members. If you are a principal and want to fill out the survey for your school’s SchoolBook page, you can still e-mail us.

On this muggy Friday — yes, muggy in January — a group of elected officials, parent advocates, educators and others are planing to issue a report card today on Mayor Bloomberg’s 10-year record on education. A news release says:

The report provides hard evidence that key Bloomberg “reforms” such as school closings have failed and left major problems with the City’s education system unsolved or worse-off, including college preparedness and the racial achievement gap.

The report will be issued at 1 p.m. on the steps of City Hall.

And the parents and teachers at Public School 118 Lorraine Hansberry in St. Albans, Queens, don’t seem to like their principal, Cynthia Feaster, very much. They are planning a protest of her “use of intimidation and deception” on Friday at 2:30 at the school at 190-20 109 Road.

From 10 a.m. to 11:30 a.m., the New York Fed will hold a news briefing on “Recession, Federal Stimulus and New York/New Jersey Schools.” The event, at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, 33 Liberty Street, Manhattan, is part of the New York Fed’s Regional Economic Press Briefing series.