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Marcia Lyles, the city’s top-ranking educator, has been offered the superintendency of a 17,000-student Delaware school district, according to a person who just left the meeting of the Christina Public Schools school board.

The six-member board voted unanimously to offer Lyles the position at about 9 p.m., Harrie Ellen Minnehan, a teacher who was at the meeting, just told me. Lyles, since 2007 the city’s deputy chancellor for teaching and learning, was not present for the vote, Minnehan said.

Minnehan described the school board meeting as unusually subdued, considering the magnitude of the announcement. “Usually when they announce something like that people are very excited,” she said. “Tonight, everyone just sat there stunned. You could literally hear a pin drop.” She said some of the 50 people in the audience got up and walked out before the vote in protest. “I could not sit in there when they voted,” Minnehan told me a principal friend said to her.

A reason for the unenthusiastic response is that the local teachers and principals unions had endorsed Lyles’ chief opponent, Freeman Williams, a longtime district educator. (more…)

Marcia Lyles, the deputy chancellor for teaching and learning, testifying at an Assembly hearing earlier this year.

Marcia Lyles, the head of the city’s teaching and learning department and one of only a handful of veteran educators who reports directly to Chancellor Joel Klein, could be on the brink of leaving the school system. The answer hinges on an announcement tonight by a school board in Delaware, where Lyles and one other candidate are vying for the job of superintendent.

The board of the Christina School District, a semi-urban, 17,000-student district comprising parts of two of Delaware’s three largest cities as well as some suburbs, has narrowed down a cast of contenders to two finalists: a longtime Delaware educator who is now serving as acting superintendent and Lyles, a Harlem native who has worked in the city’s public school system since the 1970s.

Lyles would not confirm that she has been offered the job, but a member of the Christina teachers union, Harrie Ellen Minnehan, told me that rumors are flying in Delaware that Lyles will be announced as the new superintendent tonight — against the desires of teachers and principals, many of whom favor the Delaware candidate. (more…)

Technology constraints prohibited me from live-blogging Friday’s Assembly hearing on mayoral control of the city schools, which (for those not following along) is the policy that in 2002 handed near-total education authority over to the mayor — and which is up for renewal this June.

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. (more…)
  

Garth Harries

The top Department of Education official who is set to review the city’s special education system is adding another job to his plate: He’s joining a national program designed to produce top-notch urban superintendents.

Garth Harries, who until the end of this month is the chief executive of the DOE’s portfolio department, is one of 12 people accepted into this year’s Broad Superintendents Academy class. The academy, which is based on business executive training programs, is run by the Broad Foundation, which also gives out the annual Broad Prize for Urban Education. New York City won the Broad Prize in 2007.

As a Broad fellow, Harries will stay on at the DOE but will leave the city for six multi-day retreats throughout the year. He’ll also have regular homework assignments. (Already, Helen Zelon at Insideschools has chimed in with concern about just how much Harries can cram into his calendar.) We asked Harries for a statement, and got this response from Chancellor Joel Klein instead:

Garth’s selection reflects the extraordinary work he’s done in New York and his potential to be a great superintendent in the future.

The Broad Academy says it expects its graduates to seek superintendencies, but of the DOE officials who have gone through the program, most still work in the city. (more…)

The same person who will lead the Department of Education’s review of special education masterminded the internal reorganization that’s currently underway at the department.

DOE spokesman David Cantor told me Garth Harries, who came to the DOE from the consulting firm McKinsey & Company, devised the new organization as a way to make the department more efficient. At a time when cuts to schools and “potentially hundreds of layoffs” are on the horizon, “we had a strong feeling we need to be as efficiently organized as possible,” Cantor said.

With only a few exceptions, the new organization simply adds a level of reporting between managers and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein, who until now has had more than 20 DOE officials reporting directly to him, Cantor said. “When the dust settles, there’s not really anything that’s notably different about it,” he said.

One place where changes are more substantive is in the Office of Portfolio Development, currently run by Harries, where responsibilities are being dispersed among several different managers. (more…)