The teachers at test schools like McNair should be more positive and more energetic.

If teachers at schools with difficult students burn out, OK.

But teachers at McNair have no excuse for phoning it in and acting oppressed.

But, at a more concrete level:

Make sure every grade school has at least a rooftop playground.

Stop calling art, music and gym “specials.” Recognize that those subjects are as core as math.

Move toward upgrading the office support staff. Tie some of those folks’ pay to performance.

Be a little stodgier. I think the Jersey City schools tend try a little too hard to innovate and make half-baked efforts to adopt faddish strategies that sound good on paper but don’t work.

Make sure teachers can send disruptive students out of the classroom. If teachers can be trained to manage disruptive kids, that’s great, but be realistic. For whatever reason, some kids seem to have more behavior problems than they used to. Deal with that.

Try to find and create measures of value-added other than standardized test scores. One reason for the idiotic idea that kids at P.S. 41 should have about the same test scores as kids at P.S. 16 is that the test scores are really the only quantitative indicators we have. We also need student satisfaction surveys; measures of how teachers and schools hurt or helped students’ learning trend (in other words: whatever the scores were at the start of the year, did the students move ahead at a good rate or fall behind?); and assessments by teachers or employers at the next level. How do Jersey City high school teachers assess the alumni of the grade schools? And how do Rutgers professors and various employers see the alumni of the Jersey City high schools?

Find ways to make it easier for community members to go into the schools from time to time and see what’s happening there. Have open houses that are really open to the community.

Pay students at Rutgers Newark, Seton Hall, etc. to come in, talk to some parents and students, and do school reviews that supplement the profiles in the official state school assessments.

F off completely with the idea that the school board members can’t go into the schools and can’t have a say about the small stuff.