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An office inside the Department of Education improperly recruited its employees to lobby against the state’s seniority-based layoff system, city officials acknowledged today.

Staff at the city’s Office of Family Information and Action asked hundreds of parent coordinators to distribute a petition urging state lawmakers to abolish the current layoff system. In the e-mail, an OFIA staffer asked parent coordinators to gather signatures from parents and other members of their school communities and return them to the DOE. The e-mail message went out to nearly 400 of the 1,000 parent coordinators around the city.

The petition asks state 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.”

The message, which was first reported this morning by the teacher activist Norm Scott, echoes the position of Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Chancellor Cathie Black, who have made ending the seniority-based layoffs this year a chief political goal. The city teachers union strongly opposes ending the system and has argued that the city should instead focus its lobbying efforts on fighting budget cuts.

DOE spokeswoman Natalie Ravitz said that the petition had not been approved by top city officials.

“While we strongly encourage parents to speak out on issues concerning their children’s education, it was not appropriate for Department of Education staff to prescribe a specific solution for parent coordinators, or parents, to advocate,” Ravitz said in a statement. (more…)

Department of Education officials cleared up confusion today over whether new Chancellor Cathie Black has visited any of the city’s lowest-rated schools: she hasn’t. But she intends to, they said.

During her five-borough tour of some of the city’s successful schools yesterday, reporters asked Black to talk about her visits to any of the city’s D or F-rated schools, assuming she’d seen them. Black responded:

“I’ve been to every kind of school. I will continue that, I don’t have any desire to only visit one kind of school or another.”

As of today, it appears that Black misspoke. DOE spokeswoman Natalie Ravitz said that while Black has not visited any D or F schools, she has scheduled visits to them. Ravitz would not say which struggling schools Black will visit or when.

The city announced plans last month to begin closing 26 public schools next year based on their low progress report grades and the graduation rates and test scores that form the bulk of what determines those grades. The citywide school board, called the Panel for Educational Policy, will vote on the school closures next month and meetings at some of the schools to explain their likely closure to parents will begin this week. If Black attends any of these meetings, it may be her first time in a struggling school.

Bowing to pressure from both internal and outside groups, the state has abruptly reversed a policy that banned charter schools from giving admissions preference to students who are not fluent in English.

On December 23, two days after I wrote about the New York State Education Department’s policy, state education officials informed the city’s Department of Education about the change in plan. The new policy, which will allow charter schools that want to focus on English Language Learners to give them preference in their admission lotteries, will directly and immediately affect one school: Inwood Academy for Leadership.

Initially, Inwood Academy’s principal Christina Hykes applied for a charter that would set aside 50 percent of the school’s seats for ELL students, creating two separate lotteries. But state officials told Hykes that only students “at risk of academic failure” could be singled out and given admissions preference. ELL students were not among these, officials said. (more…)