During “Lobby Week” in March, Lenny Speiller, executive director of the DOE’s Office of Public Affairs, inserted language into an email to parent coordinators asking them to share a petition calling on lawmakers to do away with seniority layoff rules for teachers, investigators concluded. Mayor Bloomberg was pushing the policy change heavily at the time. But the state constitution prohibits public employees from engaging in private political lobbying.

Parent coordinators told us that the lobbying had begun months earlier. We reported about the advocacy efforts, which the city immediately disavowed, on March 16. The next day, teachers union president Michael Mulgrew filed an official complaint against the lobbying, and SCI launched an investigation. The union opposes changes to seniority layoff rules.

The petition asked lawmakers to “allow the City to keep it’s [sic] most effective teachers by ending the State’s ‘Last-In, First-Out’ policy, allowing teachers to be retained based on their performance, rather than just seniority.” Speiller told investigators that he suggested that language but didn’t expect it to be included in the petition that parent coordinators were asked to distribute. But other DOE employees said he made clear that his revisions would be included.

The report also signals that Speiller consulted Mayor Bloomberg’s top lobbyist in Albany, Micah Lasher, on the language but that Lasher did not respond. An assistant to Lasher who was also consulted did weigh in, supporting Speiller’s language. Lasher preceded Speiller as the DOE’s top public affairs official.

The improprieties took place during the brief period when Cathie Black was schools chancellor and the response fell to her successor, Dennis Walcott.

Update: “It’s obvious that poor judgment was exercised and had staff sought appropriate counsel, this incident might never have occurred,” Walcott said today in a statement. “I have spoken with Lenny and he understands that this cannot happen again, and moving forward we will work to ensure that DOE staff understand the appropriate standards to which we must all adhere.”

DOE officials said Speiller must undergo ethics training and has had a letter placed in his personnel file. The report also signals that the city’s Conflicts of Interests Board might find grounds to censure Speiller.

SCI’s full report is below.

Just when Micah C. Lasher thought it was safe to finally sleep one recent morning, three words appeared in his in-box: “It’s a sham.”

Mr. Lasher had stayed up all night helping write a bill to increase the number of charter schools in New York, a cornerstone of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s education agenda. But amid the frenzy, a highly contentious provision had slipped by him: the State University of New York would lose its power to approve charter schools.

If SUNY’s Charter School Institute really was only saved during a middle-of-the-night wrangling, that could be a bad sign for the organization’s future: the Institute is currently facing budget cuts that might gut its operations.

But all of our information suggests that lawmakers supported keeping SUNY’s ability to oversee charters. The provision that could have revoked SUNY’s chartering authority was the result of a manic bill drafting process and late-night fatigue, not an attack on the widely-praised charter school overseers.

“The Assembly was on the same page as us, in that the goal all along was to preserve SUNY’s chartering authority,” Lasher told GothamSchools today. “At worst, the language folks were concerned about was an ambiguity.”

That jives with what I heard the day the bill was passed from Jonas Chartock, the head of the SUNY Charter Schools Institute, and Assemblyman Sam Hoyt, one of the bill’s main proponents and the sponsor of the chapter amendment that clarified that SUNY would remain an independent authorizer of charter schools.

And even Richard Ianuzzi, the head of the state teachers union who has been skeptical of current charter school oversight practices, is on the record opposing cuts to the Institute as long as they maintain chartering authority.

At a meeting of the City Council Education Committee this afternoon, council members, along with teachers union president Michael Mulgrew, accused the Department of Education of dragging its heels in putting key provisions of the new school governance law into place.

At issue is how soon the DOE will make three key changes: returning superintendents to work exclusively in their districts, including parents of special education and English-language learner students on Community Education Councils and beginning work to open a new parent training center.

Testifying before the Council, Micah Lasher, the education department’s executive director of public affairs, said that he expected all of the new changes to be implemented fully by the end of this school year.

But Council Education Committee Chair Robert Jackson complained that time frame is too long. “The law doesn’t give you a year,” he said. “We need this implemented now.”

Lasher, alongside supervising superintendent Dorita Gibson and department general counsel Michael Best, argued that the department needs a full year to properly and smoothly introduce the changes.

Before the new governance law was passed, the education department assigned the city’s 32 community superintendents to work with principals and schools throughout the city rather than in specific school districts. The new law requires the superintendents to work “predominantly within their districts.”

Council member Dominic Recchia told the DOE officials that he had heard from superintendents who were still responsible for 20 to 30 schools outside of their district.

Lasher and Gibson responded that superintendents are now spending the vast majority of their time working within their assigned districts. But they acknowledged that superintendents are still devoting a small amount of effort to handing off their out-of-district duties to network leaders. Superintendents have developed relationships in schools over time, Lasher told council members, and their accumulated knowledge is needed to smooth schools’ transition to new leadership.

“I think it would be leaving schools in the lurch if we flipped a switch and said, you’re out of this and you’re in it,” Lasher said.

Lasher also emphasized that, under the letter of the law, superintendents are permitted to spend small portions of their time on out-of-district tasks so long as they are assigned “predominantly” to in-district duties. “We are in compliance with the law,” he said.

DOE spokeswoman Ann Forte said that three weeks into the school year, the department had received no reports of any superintendents so overwhelmed by out-of-district duties that they were prevented from devoting time to their in-district schools. And Lasher told council members that if there was ever a conflict between a superintendent’s responsibilities to a school outside their district with ones in their district, the in-district school would take priority.

Jackson also expressed frustration at the sluggish pace of efforts to fulfill another new requirement.  Each Community Education Council now must include a parent of an English-language learner and a parent of a special education student.

Lasher explained that the Office of Family Engagement and Advocacy is now conducting preliminary research into how many CECs currently fill the requirement and which councils may soon have vacancies before the chancellor proposes any new regulations to fulfill the new mandate; a proposal would then need to pass through a month-long comment period go before the city-wide school board for approval. Lasher estimated that it would be January before any firm plan to reserve spots for parents on the CECs would be put in place.

“This in particular is a complicated decision and we want to get it right,” Lasher said.

“Why is it so complicated?” Jackson asked. “Can’t you just expand the CECs by two slots?”

Again, the question comes down to the letter of the law, said Michael Best. The statute provides for nine CEC members, including the two parents.

Council members also wondered about the parent training center. Very little is currently known about what form the center will take, and council member Albert Vann asked about the delay.

Lasher responded that the city was waiting for the state to allocate funds for the center before initiating work to build the center, prompting Jackson to wonder why the city needed to wait to take the initiative.

The parent training center is part of four chapter amendments to the school governance law that have not yet been passed by the state Senate but which Mayor Bloomberg and the DOE have agreed to implement as part of the legislative deal. The amendment calls for the city to match state contributions of funding for the center, with each side contributing up to $800,000.

A source inside the education department said that while there are ways the Senate could allocate funds for the center before the amendments are passed, the city money cannot be set aside for the project until the state has set the ball in motion.

Critics noted that the city has had ample time since the law was passed to plan for changes. And they criticized the education department for failing to embrace the true intent of the legislation.

“There’s the letter of the law, and there’s the spirit of the law,” said principals union spokeswoman Chiara Coletti. “We had hoped the transition would happen more rapidly, because the law was very clear.”

Teachers union president Michael Mulgrew said that there was no reason the process should have taken so long.

“The DOE has received nothing but cooperation from all of the interested parties in instituting this law as quickly as possible,” he told Jackson. “It is now incumbent upon them.”

UPDATE: This post has been updated to correct an error that implied the 2002 school governance law specified that community superintendents work with schools outside their districts; the law did not substantially change the legal role of the superintendents, though in practice a DOE reorganization assigned superintendents duties outside their districts as well.

In a memo to colleagues, Klein lays out the DOE’s new landscape, noting that it’s on an “interim basis,” though Cerf has not said he’ll return to the department.

John White, who is currently the Chief Executive Officer of the Office of Portfolio Planning, will serve as the Interim Acting Deputy Chancellor for Strategy and Innovation. White has overseen various space fights between charter schools and district schools throughout the city, prompting Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer to declare that he has (or had) “the worst job — ever.” Debra Kurshan, who is currently the Senior Director of Portfolio Planning, will take on some of White’s previous responsibilities.

Micah Lasher, a key player in Mayor Bloomberg’s efforts to get mayoral control renewed this summer, is also changing jobs. His new title is Interim Acting Executive Director of External Affairs and, for what that means in plainer English, see the memo below:

The strong thrust of Friday’s hearing, the last of five that have taken Assembly members on a tour through the boroughs, was that lawmakers are not happy with the system they created. Some have become even less happy during the hearings in every borough over the last few months.

A few flubbed exchanges with lawmakers have not helped the Bloomberg administration’s case. One such embarrassing moment happened one Friday, when officials failed to produce the graduation rate for black males.

Here are some of the highlights from Friday:

• Thirteen Assembly members attended the hearing, one of the largest showings so far, and I didn’t hear any of them speak positively about mayoral control. Two members made their dissatisfaction most clear. “I can assure you that my opinion has changed a lot in these hearings,” Assemblyman Daniel O’Donnell of Manhattan declared, after angrily chastising Department of Education officials during a question-and-answer session. “Talking to my legislative colleagues over the last three months, the question in my mind is no longer if we’re going to make any changes to the law. It’s going to be what changes are we going to make,” declared Mark Weprin of Queens.
• Deputy Chancellor Chris Cerf declared passionately that the administration is open to making concessions as the legislature looks at mayoral control. “We have never come before this body and said anything other than that this statute is not a scared writ, and we need to work collaboratively with you and with others to improve up on it,” he said. He also pledged that he is in favor of adding on an independent body to study the Department of Education’s data. “I do believe these data, and I would be thrilled to have an independent body looking at them,” he said. “I would be thrilled to get this out of the realm of rhetoric and newspaper coverage.”
• Interrogation by Assemblyman Hakeem Jeffries about the black male graduation rate led to an embarrassing moment when Department of Education officials, who have made civil rights a major component of their rationale for changing the city schools, disclosed that they did not know the black male graduation rate off hand and had not included it in a 20-page packet highlighting their successes. Caught off guard, the lineup of officials issued a series of promises to find the figure, while urgently paging through files before them. Cerf had a extra-large white binder titled BRIEFING BOOK on his lap.

Throughout the exchange, the department’s new chief lobbyist, Micah Lasher, appeared distressed. He repeatedly walked briskly up to the table where the officials sat facing the lawmakers, his teeth clenched, and whispered urgently into several of their ears. At one point, he threw up his hands and retreated to a seat just beyond the officials, where he rubbed his sinuses vigorously.

• Nick Perry, a Brooklyn member of the Assembly, interrogated the Department of Education’s chief parent-relations official, Martine Guerrier, so heatedly that Deputy Mayor Dennis Walcott ultimately intervened to stand up for Guerrier. Perry’s questions had to do with several calls he placed to Guerrier’s office on behalf of a parent whose dyslexic child was suffering from bullying. “My office reached out to you: No response. I personally reached out: No response,” Perry said. “I even complained to the chancellor, and I got no response.” He said that he believed the un-responsiveness was one of the problems of mayoral control.
• David Bloomfield, the Brooklyn College professor who runs a principal training program, challenged the idea that principals are “empowered” under the Bloomberg school reforms. “There are so many mandates that come down from central, budget and otherwise, that many veteran principals who do leave the system complain that they had more discretion under the old system,” he said, “that good principals always found a way to work within that system and now their hands are tied even more.”
• The issue of how to judge the Bloomberg administration’s success at raising test scores received an extended debate between Assemblyman James Brennan, author of the report I wrote about that challenged the city’s claims, and Marcia Lyles, the deputy chancellor for teaching and learning. Lyles devoted a substantial part of her testimony to challenging Brennan’s assertion that the changes the mayor brought only began in 2003, not 2002. She described meeting personally with the chancellor when he first took over, and being taken aback — but excited and energized — by his high expectations for her schools’ performance.

Brennan later countered her claim by interrogating Walcott on when the real changes to the system began. He argued that simply asking Lyles and other superintendents to improve did not constitute the real start of the Bloomberg administration’s school efforts. “An anecdotal or a testimonial that the chancellor wants someone to improve the prior year is hardly the same thing as an entire structural overhaul,” Brennan said.

• Lawmakers repeatedly raised concerns that charter schools are causing a “two-tiered system” where some students get excellent educations while others languish in failing schools. Education committee chair Catherine Nolan ended Friday’s hearing by highlighting that exact issue — “the growing disparity of a certain group that’s lucky enough to win the lottery, and then everybody else,” is how she described it — and saying she hopes to discuss it more in the future.

Chancellor Joel Klein conducted at least one of his meetings with lawmakers in his office at Tweed Courthouse.

After suffering a beating from legislators who accused him of being rudely unresponsive to their concerns since taking office in 2003, Schools Chancellor Joel Klein is taking the hint and reaching out.

In the last few weeks, Klein has walked  Mark Weprin, a Queens lawmaker who is one of his sharpest critics on the Assembly’s education committee, through his Tweed Courthouse headquarters; sat down with a handful of other lawmakers; and made appointments with more, including the committee’s chairwoman, Catherine Nolan. He has also begun, through his staff, to send out prompt replies to lawmakers’ requests.

“We’re getting letters answered, we’re getting information that we’ve asked for,” a spokeswoman for Nolan, Kathleen Whynot, said. “We have a really good working relationship right now with some of the DOE staff, which has been a nice addition.”

Assembly members said the outreach began after they launched a series of five hearings on the subject of mayoral control — the governance structure that Klein strongly supports, but which several lawmakers have criticized as authoritarian. The state legislature handed the mayor control in 2002, but the law they wrote sunsets this year, and so many in Albany are rolling up their sleeves and hoping to revise it.

The hearings were a chance for citizens to give their thoughts on how they’d like the law changed (or not). They also became opportunities for the lawmakers to air their concerns. Several of the complaints had to do specifically with Klein and his staff, who lawmakers said frequently failed to respond even to basic questions and concerns. The complaints accelerated at a hearing held in Manhattan where Klein himself testified, sitting before a row of lawmakers who took turns rebuking him.

The chancellor began to get in touch with lawmakers just days after that Friday hearing. Daniel O’Donnell, an Assemblyman from Manhattan who deployed sarcasm and a few smirks during his interrogation, said his cell phone rang early into the very next week. The legislature was in session, so O’Donnell let the phone buzz. When he came out, he said, “There was a voicemail message from Joel Klein. I had to play it twice to make sure I was hearing that correctly.”

Weprin met with Klein at his office in Tweed Courthouse, just next door to City Hall. The men took a walking tour through Tweed, even stopping by a kindergarten class at the Ross Global Charter School, which is housed in Tweed’s bottom floor. They also sat down to talk about Weprin’s concerns with the mayoral control system. “He didn’t say great idea bad idea, but he was open to listening and said that we’ll talk about it and see if there are things we can agree on,” Weprin said. “So at least that’s different than saying, ‘We have a difference of opinion, we’re not budging.’”

Weprin said the extra attention from Klein is coming as a surprise to his colleagues — and he has a theory for Klein’s change in approach. “Micah Lasher’s fingerprints are all over this thing,” he said, referring to the school system’s newly hired lobbyist. “He seems like a young guy, but he’s pretty savvy on how to deal with human beings and legislators. I have a feeling he might have said, ‘Houston, there’s a problem here.’”

Lasher did not take credit for the meetings. “I think my sense of the chancellor is he’s a very accessible person, but he’s a busy guy,” he told me on the telephone this afternoon. “I have no idea what ships have passed in the night over years past. All I know is that in my brief time here, every time a legislator has reached out to him, he’s been very eager to hear their concerns.”

Amid mounting speculation that the mayor could sacrifice Klein for the sake of preserving mayoral control, the stakes for repairing his relationship with lawmakers could be high. Weprin named an even greater possible risk if Klein fails to work cooperatively: The law’s sunset could come and go without the main players reaching any consensus, and the school system could be sent back to a state almost no one seems to desire — the way it was before 2002, when a school board picked the chancellor and finger-pointing over responsibility was the main substance of education fights.

“I don’t want to make it look like we’re the gang that can’t shoot straight, but let’s face it. This requires an affirmative act by three groups: the Senate, the Assembly, and the governor,” he said. “If the’yre going to stick to their dotted I’s and their crossed T’s, we will defintely have a problem.”

Meet the Department of Education’s new chief lobbyist, Micah Lasher.

At the Post’s Daily Politics blog, Liz Benjamin reports that Lasher, a 27-year-old political whiz kid fresh off a stint in Rep. Jerry Nadler’s office, is now the DOE’s executive director of public affairs. That’s the position held by Terence Tolbert until his sudden death at the beginning of November while he was on leave working for the Obama campaign in Nevada. Lasher has already updated his Facebook profile (above) to reflect his new job.

As the DOE’s top lobbyist, Lasher is now responsible for pushing the DOE’s agenda in Albany. At the top of that agenda, of course, is convincing lawmakers to preserve mayoral control before the 2002 law giving control of the city schools to the mayor expires at the end of June. Lasher will also have to work some magic if the city’s schools are to escape relatively unscathed in this year’s budget fight. (Fortunately, he has experience working magic; he published a book on the subject when he was just 14.)

By the time Lasher graduated from Stuyvesant High School in 1999, he had already worked on several local campaigns. In 2002, while he was still enrolled at New York University, Lasher helped found Knickerbocker SKD, the political communications firm that counts among its clients the Fund for Public Schools, the DOE’s non-profit fundraising wing, and Caroline Kennedy, who worked as a DOE fundraiser from 2002 to 2004.