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A desperate phone push to save thousands of teacher layoffs has yielded mixed results, depending on who you ask.

On Tuesday, Public Advocate Bill de Blasio launched a phone drive to implore New Yorkers to dial 311 – the city’s service line – and file complaints about Mayor Bloomberg’s plan to lay off 4,100 teachers as part of his budget proposal.

Since then, 311 operators have received at most 336 calls about the budget, according to data from the Department of Information of Technology and Telecommunications. That number spiked on Tuesday, with 109, and again today, with 83.

DoITT tracks all 311 calls, which amount to over 50,000 per day. Spokesman Nick Sbordone ran the data for three categories that are relevant to de Blasio’s phone drive: “NYC Budget Proposal”; “School Closures and Budget Cuts” and “Comments for the Mayor.”

Average daily calls specifically about school budget cuts doubled compared to the previous week, but the overall totals still fell below what some had hoped.

“That’s all the phone calls that came into 311?” asked Leonie Haimson, who organized her own efforts via email today. “I would have hoped that there would be thousands of phone calls.”

De Blasio, whose phone drive goal was to reach 2,500 people through his phone drive, was more optimistic about the turnout.

“That so many are flooding the phones in the lead-up to the budget decision shows just how big a priority this is for anyone with children in our public schools,” he said.

Charter school parents won’t be the only ones taking to the streets tomorrow. Protests are also planned against planned teacher layoffs, a charter school co-location, and low funding for struggling schools.

Public Advocate Bill de Blasio is organizing a “Parent Day of Action” against the city’s 4,100 planned teacher layoffs. Yesterday, de Blasio launched a website featuring videos of parents speaking out against the cuts. Tomorrow, starting in Brooklyn during the morning commute, de Blasio will be joined by parent volunteers to collect anti-layoff testimonials from other New Yorkers at sites throughout the city. The testimonials will be posted in real time to de Blasio’s Twitter and YouTube pages and to his own parent advocacy site, according to spokesman Matthew Wing.

In Manhattan, parents and teachers in the Brandeis High School campus are rallying at 5:30 p.m. against the potential addition of a charter school, Upper West Success Academy. The rally precedes a public hearing about the co-location, which would bring an elementary school into a building that so far has only middle and high school students. The hearing is sure to draw supporters of Upper West Success, one of few schools in Eva Moskowitz’s Success Charter Network that is not named in the UFT-NAACP lawsuit.

And in the Bronx, student activists are planning a half-hour march at the end of their school day to demand that the city use federal funds to help more low-performing schools. The students, from the Urban Youth Collaborative and other groups, are walking to Banana Kelly High School, which the city announced earlier this month would receive new funding and supports, from Samuel Gompers High School, which was not included in the city’s “restart” plans.

Attending one (or more) of tomorrow’s events? Send pictures and comments to tips@gothamschools.org.

United Federation of Teachers President Michael Mulgrew said the mayor should not have to lay off teachers given that Wall Street rebounded this year.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story mischaracterized the size of the rally. Thousands of people attended this afternoon’s rally, according to multiple people who attended and other press accounts. Protesters came from multiple locations and then converged near Wall Street.

Thousands of teachers joined elected officials in a symbolic march from City Hall to Wall Street this afternoon to protest Mayor Bloomberg’s proposed budget cuts.

“You took the money from us, now we’re going to where you sent the money,” said Rev. Al Sharpton, who helped lead the march along with national teachers union president Randi Weingarten and half a dozen City Council members.

The march was designed to dramatize the argument that opponents of Bloomberg are making in response to his budget, which calls for laying off more than 4,000 teachers. In a year when Wall Street’s recovery contributed to a citywide surplus, they ask, why are teachers being laid off?

“I never expected to come home to see New York act like Wisconsin,” Weingarten told the screaming crowd.

Bloomberg has blamed the draconian budget on state cuts and pointed out that the surplus this year is not large enough to plug projected gaps next year — an assessment the Independent Budget Office seconded in a recent analysis. (more…)

Community Education Council 14 President Tessa Wilson said the city should extend the delay of this year's bungled parent council elections.

A day after this year’s troubled parent council elections were postponed by one week, some of their leading critics say the election process is completely on hold.

Yesterday, a group of parents filed a lawsuit asking for a restraining order to halt the elections. Chancellor Dennis Walcott immediately responded by saying he would postpone elections for a week.

After a meeting this afternoon between city lawyers and the lawyers representing the parents who sued over the election proceedings, the elections are now on hold “indefinitely,” according to Chris Owens, executive director of Advocates for Justice, the law firm that filed the suit.

The DOE disputed the account, saying that nothing has changed since yesterday.

“We continue to have discussions with interested parties regarding this matter, but we have not made any further changes to the process and we have a responsibility to ensure that Council members begin their terms on July 1st,” said Deirdrea Miller, a DOE spokeswoman, in a statement.

At a press conference today, elected officials called for the elections to be delayed further, contending that a week was too little time to undo the damage and that the Department of Education has neglected the parent councils, called Community Education Councils.

“The DOE doesn’t care to get it right,” said Public Advocate Bill de Blasio. “The CECs never get the support they deserve.” (more…)

Under pressure from elected officials and organized parents, the Department of Education is delaying elections for district parent councils until next week.

For weeks, parent leaders have been simmering with anger over problems in the city’s handling of elections for district Community Education Councils. They have charged that the city did too little to recruit candidates, turned away some eligible parents, and hid the names of candidates behind password protection.

The criticism escalated today, as Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer and Public Advocate Bill de Blasio announced plans for a press conference Tuesday to demand that the city halt the elections, which they called “deeply flawed and undemocratic.” At the same time, a group of parents, spearheaded by Mona Davids of the New York City Parents Union, filed today for a restraining order to halt the elections.

This afternoon, the city announced it would delay the election proceedings by a week. “After reviewing concerns raised by parents and public officials about this year’s Citywide and Community Education Council elections, I have concluded that the process could and should have been handled better,” Chancellor Dennis Walcott said in a statement. (more…)

Michael Hall, the father of a second grader at P.S. 114, said the Canarsie elementary school should remain open.

Teachers, parents, and community activists protested the city’s plans to shutter a Canarsie elementary school today in front of the Department of Education’s headquarters. (more…)

Public Advocate Bill de Blasio, speaking today on the steps of the Department of Education

When two courts halted the city’s plans to close 19 public schools this year, judges ruled that the city didn’t follow state law that requires it to engage parents and report the impact that the changes will have on students’ educations.

Now Public Advocate Bill de Blasio is arguing that the city is making the same mistakes when it decides to place multiple schools in the same buildings.

In a report released today, de Blasio charges that the city did not give parents enough information about how changes to space usage would affect instructional programs or about public hearings on the changes.

“They’re just doing the minimum amount of parent outreach so they can say they did,” de Blasio said today.

De Blasio’s office and the Alliance for Quality Education surveyed nearly 875 parents at 34 schools, about half of those that the city proposed moving into new, shared space last year. (Roughly half of public schools citywide currently share building space with other schools.) (more…)

New York parents may soon have a new advocacy group to help them press for change in the city schools, led by Public Advocate Bill de Blasio.

De Blasio announced the group, which will be known as the “Parent Advocate Coordinating Team,” or PACT, at a town hall forum on education his office held last night in downtown Brooklyn. The public advocate’s staff began collecting contact information for parents last night, and de Blasio said that he hoped to mobilize parents across the city.

At the meeting, De Blasio specifically mentioned organizing against the proposed MTA student Metrocard cuts, and he has called for a moratorium on giving charter schools space in city school buildings. De Blasio’s office hasn’t yet determined what topics the parent group will tackle first, de Blasio spokeswoman Maibe Gonzalez said. (Gonzalez is a former spokeswoman for the Department of Education.) (more…)

Stuck between two party bosses and a union that boosted him, the city’s public advocate has made a best-of-both-worlds choice on the Race to the Top.

Public Advocate Bill de Blasio endorsed raising the state cap on charter schools today, but he stopped short of arguing the cap should be eliminated altogether, as Governor David Paterson has done and the Obama administration has encouraged. De Blasio also amended his endorsement with a list of tweaks he’d like to see in charter school law, including many that resemble recommendations the union made last week.

Like many other local politicians who favor raising the cap, de Blasio gave no other reason for his support other than that raising the cap will boost the state’s Race to the Top application. “I strongly support raising the cap on charter schools and giving New York State the best possible opportunity to compete for much needed federal education funding,” de Blasio said.

De Blasio’s letter, which was co-signed by a majority of City Council members, did not specify how high he wants the cap lifted. (more…)

UFT President Michael Mulgrew announces the union's lawsuit. Behind Mulgrew are, from left to right, Public Advocate Bill de Blasio, NAACP NY President Hazel Dukes, Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer and Yolanda Morales, a plaintiff in the suit.

The city teachers union, along with a coalition of parents and advocacy groups, sued the Department of Education this morning, charging it with not spending allocated state money on reducing class sizes.

Since 2007, the state has allocated nearly $761 million for class size reduction, yet class sizes in schools across the city have risen over the past two years.

The lawsuit accuses the DOE of causing the class size increase by willfully misusing those funds.

“As far as we are concerned, this is deliberate,” UFT President Michael Mulgrew said in a press conference at union headquarters this morning.

“New York City how has the highest class sizes in New York State,” Mulgrew said. “$760 million, for what?”

The lawsuit, filed this morning in the State Supreme Court in the Bronx, was brought by a coalition of parents, activist groups, the UFT, the New York chapter of the NAACP and the Hispanic Federation.

“The charges are without merit,” DOE Press Secretary David Cantor said. (more…)