Alexandria’s newly appointed superintendent doesn’t sleep much.
“It’s probably not a healthy thing,” Morton Sherman said during a teleconference with reporters Tuesday. “If you send me an e-mail at 3:30 in the morning, there’s a bit of a chance you’ll get an e-mail back in a half-hour.”
Sherman,who will leave Tenafly Public Schools in New Jersey to head up Alexandria’s schools in August, imparted that bit of personal information to illustrate his belief in open and honest dialogue in the school system.
“Anyone who writes to me, I’ll respond to them,” he said. “I take great pride in leveraging the organization so that you have access to me.”
Sherman said Alexandria’s size and diversity are what compelled him to make the switch from Tenafly, which has about 3,500 students compared with Alexandria’s 10,600.
“When I first began thinking about life after Tenafly, it was real clear to me that the kind of district I was seeking was one where it was vibrant and diverse, and where there was a candid debate going on about the challenges that we are all facing in American school districts,” he said.
Sherman said that while the Tenafly and Cherry Hill school districts, where he was superintendent for a combined 10 1/2 years, were significantly less racially diverse than Alexandria schools, they had large populations of low-income students.
“There are many ways to be diverse,” he said. “The achievement gap specifically in Alexandria has to do with another conversation that is very tough for America, which is looking at race, looking at achievement and being candid about that.”
Sherman said there are no easy fixes for improving the poorer performance of minority students as a group, but that he believes in “exposing the data so that you can get a sense of the students.”
He also believes in teachers reinforcing the message, “This is important, you can do it, and I won’t give up on you.
“I think, beyond program, we can put a mentality and a belief system in place that can close the achievement gap,” he said.
In Cherry Hill, where Sherman helped reduce the achievement gap, he enlisted the leaders of a local minority civic organization to develop a set of recommendations for the school system, he said.
While Sherman implemented at a Cherry Hill school the International Baccaulaurate program, which Alexandria is considering, he said the Alexandria community should evaluate all of the options before determining what is best for the city’s schools.
Sherman mentioned exploring more Advanced Placement classes or the Singapore Math program as possibilities.
“For me, I’m not an iconoclast that says you absolutely must have IB,” he said. “I always put it in the context of what is the very best available for Alexandria students.”
