The Department of Education, despite its failure to notify parents of children in New York City’s 331 failing schools of their right to transfer their children out of those schools, has set a deadline for today for transfer requests. This seems in direct contravention of the federal No Child Left Behind Act, which for the first time gave parents a right under federal law to escape disastrous public schools.

More than 250,000 students out of 1.1 million total in New York City are in schools that are deemed “failing.” No Child Left Behind demands that parents have the opportunity to transfer their children out of failing schools or receive free tutoring if they elect to stay. The law also requires that parents be notified of their rights, which is where the problems have come. Out of more than 250,000 qualifying students, the city has received but 50,000 responses requesting either transfers or tutoring. The city’s Department of Education needs to determine why 80% of parents are unaccounted.

Part of the problem was illuminated earlier this year when a group of parents filed a class-action lawsuit claiming that the city has failed to comply with the new federal law. In their complaint, the parents related stories of having not ever been notified by their schools, their school districts, or the Department of Education of their rights. There was even a school that sent a letter, claiming, in defiance of federal law, that transfer requests could be turned down because of lack of space.

For its part, the Department of Education says that it has undertaken an outreach program for parents with children in poor schools. A spokesman for the department, David Shea, told The New York Sun that this outreach included more than half a million letters mailed home to parents (“in 10 different languages”), about 170,000 prerecorded phone calls from Schools Chancellor Klein, flyers sent home with students, and an informational Web site.

Critics of the department insist that it is not doing enough to comply with federal law. The chairwoman of the City Council’s education committee, Eva Moskowitz, told the Sun that the outreach program was riddled with problems. Among the problems is that students in pre-K, and particularly those students graduating to middle school, are not informed that they have a choice not to graduate to failing schools. About 75% of the city’s middle schools — what Ms. Moskowitz calls the “education slaughterhouse” — qualify as failing.

Further, the pre-recorded message that went out to parents did not inform parents of the March 31 deadline. Also, letters sent out to parents bore a return address from Virginia, leading some parents to think that they were being given the choice to ship their children to another state.

No arbitrary deadline deprives parents of the rights granted by the No Child Left Behind legislation. Parents, Ms. Moskowitz stressed, are entitled to ask for tutoring at any time, including during the summer months, something the schools have not been telling the parents. Students can leave a failing school any time. For the Department of Education to be giving parents the run-around amounts to a significant abdication.

“The facts speak for themselves,” Mr. Shea told us. “The type of outreach efforts we’ve made are an aggressive outreach to parents. We are clearly moving in the right direction.” The “right direction” would be far more than a fifth of parents exercising the choices to which they are entitled. Unless it believes that only this small number of parents cares enough for their children to do so, the Department of Education has more work to do.