Tuesday, September 25, 2012

Jersey City's schools chief Marcia Lyles aims to empower parents, equalize schools' funding



Day in the life: Jersey City Schools Superintendent Marcia V. Lyles
EnlargeJersey City Schools Superintendent Marcia V. Lyles visits with 1st graders in Mrs. Gonsiewski's class at P.S. # 38 in Jersey City during the first day of school on Wednesday, Sept. 5, 2012. Lauren Casselberry/The Jersey JournalDay in the life: Jersey City Schools Superintendent Marcia V. Lyles gallery (31 photos)
If you ask new Jersey City Schools Superintendent Marcia V. Lyles how she’s faring in her new job, she may show you her schedule on the computer in her office.
It’s completely filled with back-to-back meetings, conferences and events, with barely a minute of downtime between. But that suits Lyles just fine, she told The Jersey Journal yesterday as she outlined her goals for the 29,000-student district she now heads.
“I love it,” she said. “I’m feeling right at home.”
Lyles moved to Jersey City three weeks ago, just before the Board of Education finalized the contract that made her Jersey City’s first female African-American schools chief. That pact keeps her in the district until June 2016, and Lyles said she wants to focus on empowering parents, evaluating whether all the district’s schools are funded equally and perhaps revamping how the district prepares its graduates for a post-high school life.
“We’re going to have to really dig deep into our college and career-ready programs,” she said. “We have to make sure they are really meeting the standards of today’s workforce.”
Lyles faces a struggle improving the district’s test scores. Only 19 percent of the district’s schools met federal education benchmarks last year.
Lyles said there may be an “overemphasis” on test scores as a measurement of student achievement, but she added there must be some kind of objective measure so school districts know if their methods are working.
Besides, she added, “exams are a way of life,” and students who don’t perform well on standardized testing in their elementary and high-school years will probably not do well on their SATs, and may subsequently get “locked out” of good colleges.
Lyles’ appointment was hardly an easy process. The nearly year-long search process was dominated by a contingent of critics who said the job should go to top administrator Franklin Walker, who served as interim superintendent for much of the year.
Critics also cited Lyles’ participation in the Broad Superintendents Academy as evidence that she is too cozy with state Education Commissioner Chris Cerf, also a graduate of Broad (rhymes with “road”).
Lyles said she thinks much of the controversy surrounding Broad is the result of “misinformation.” She said yesterday she doesn’t agree with all of the academy’s principles, but still counts it as a “powerful learning experience” that taught her about innovation in the education world.
“Let’s not come up with the same answers to our old problems, because they just haven’t worked for us,” she said.

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