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. They had also opposed Lyles in part because of her affiliation with the Broad Foundation, which operates a principal training program that she attended several years ago, Minnehan told Elizabeth earlier.

“It wasn’t so much a question of not supporting her, it was a question of supporting the other candidate,” Minnehan told me. “We’ve known him and we like him and he’s been a very good interim superintendent.”

Should Lyles accept the board’s offer, she would be moving to a school district very different from the one she would be leaving behind. The Christina district is the largest school district in Delaware, but the population of the entire state is less than the number of students in New York City’s schools. Every school in the district except one has so many students living in poverty that they receive special federal funds, and 35 percent of children in the state attend private schools. 

Plus, Minnehan said, Newark and Wilmington, the two cities that are partially included in the Christina district, just aren’t big cities. “I’ve lived in Manhattan, and living in Manhattan just isn’t in any way, shape, or form like living in Delaware,” she said. “If you want to do something fun in Delaware, you go to Philadelphia.”

And with an active school board, the political situation is Christina is very different from what Lyles is set to leave behind. “We have to learn to work with her, and she has to learn to work with us,” Minnehan said, referring to her role in the teachers union. “It’s going to be a whole different situation for her. She’ll have to answer to the board.”

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.

Minnehan said teachers are concerned about Lyles because she was trained by the Broad Foundation’s Superintendents Academy, which trains educators and businesspeople to lead urban school districts. “We don’t want anybody here from the Broad Foundation, because we had a guy from the Broad Foundation a couple of years ago who bankrupted the district,” she said. “If the board turns around and hands her a job, there’s going to be a firestorm here.”

Minnehan was referring to Joseph Wise, a former executive at the Walt Disney Company who left Christina in 2005 to become the head of schools in a Florida district. Delaware’s state auditor later said Wise left the district “in pathetic shape” financially. Wise is now the CEO of EdisonLearning, a for-profit education firm. The superintendent who is now being replaced was also trained by the Broad Foundation. She left to become Delaware’s secretary of education.

Philissa asked Lyles whether she is about to be offered a new job at yesterday’s Panel for Education Policy meeting in Manhattan. “I haven’t been offered,” Lyles said. “That’s a process that’s ongoing.” Lyles did not return an e-mail message and phone call today, and her secretary said she does not know if Lyles has plans to travel to Delaware tonight.

If Lyles is offered and accepts the position in Christina, she would be the second veteran educator in a week to leave the city Department of Education. Linda Wernikoff, the department’s top special education administrator, announced last week that she plans to retire at the end of the school year.

In New York City, Lyles began her career as a teacher and then became a superintendent in Brooklyn’s troubled Ocean Hill-Brownsville neighborhood, staying in the job for five years. As deputy chancellor for teaching and learning, Lyles’ influence on the school system has been muted, at least from public view.

Like others in her position in the past six years, Lyles has played a more minor role than previous teaching and learning heads did before Mayor Bloomberg took control of the public schools and made organizational changes a priority. Lyles has spearheaded an overhaul of gifted and talented programs and revisions to the city’s ban on social promotion.

Minnehan said that when Lyles spoke to teachers in Delaware, she emphasized her experience at closing the achievement gap. She said Lyles also repeatedly declared that “when the music changed, her dance step would change.” Lyles made a similar statement to the New York Times, when she was profiled by the paper in 2007, explaining that the saying, from an African proverb, encourages people to be flexible and open to change.

We’ll keep you posted on the Christina school board’s announcement.

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.

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. Deputy Chancellor for Teaching and Learning Marcia Lyles was a Broad Fellow in 2006. Christopher Cerf, who supervises human resources and communications, and his assistant, Joel Rose, both went through the program before they came to the DOE when each was CEO of the for-profit Edison Schools group. And Shael Polakow-Suransky, Eric Nadelstern’s deputy in the Empowerment Schools network, is a current fellow. Only former regional superintendent Jean-Claude Brizard left the system for a superintendency elsewhere after completing the Broad training program; he is now the head of the Rochester, N.Y., schools.

According to the foundation, just 2 percent of applicants were accepted to the academy this year. Other fellows include two top officials from the Chicago Public Schools, a handful of business executives, and several military leaders (one a deputy in the U.S. Army’s Joint Improvised Explosive Device Organization!).

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. The charter schools office is going to Eric Nadelstern, the system’s new “chief schools officer.” The groups that have supported career and technical education and small learning communities within larger schools will report to Marcia Lyles, who leads the department’s teaching and learning division. And the “systems planning” personnel, who work on creating, siting, and closing schools, will now fall under the supervision of Kathleen Grimm, the deputy chancellor for finance and administration.

Still reporting directly to the chancellor, in addition to Grimm, Lyles, and Nadelstern, are accountability czar James Liebman; Christopher Cerf, the deputy chancellor who supervises human resources and communications; and Chief Operating Officer Photeine Anagnostopolous. Cantor said the new organization is not set in stone but he does not expect “seismic change.”