The great defender
Bill: Schools big not target of suit
A FUMING MAYOR de Blasio struggled again on Friday to defend his choice of Richard Carranza to lead the nation’s largest school system, insisting his new schools chancellor wasn’t the “subject” of a sexual discrimination case he was the subject of.
Carranza’s former employer, the San Francisco school district, paid $75,000 to settle a discrimination suit involving Carranza in 2016.
The suit brought by longtime educator Veronica Chavez said Carranza ruined her career after she called him out for flirting at a conference with another woman.
The suit said Carranza, 51, victimized Chavez as part of a series of moves he made to snub women employees when he was superintendent in 2013, but it did not name him as an individual defendant. The suit instead targeted the school district.
De Blasio said he doesn’t believe the charges made by Chavez, but City Hall officials never contacted Chavez or her attorney to see if her claims were true.
That didn’t stop de Blasio from ripping the claims made by the single mom in his weekly appearance on WNYC’s “The Brian Lehrer Show. “
“Brian, respectfully, I don’t understand why you’re looking at Daily News stories and repeating them without independently verifying the facts,” de Blasio said when Lehrer asked him about the suit, first reported by The News on March 7.
Lehrer responded by pointing out that The News report merely quoted from the suit brought by Chavez, but de Blasio wasn’t having it.
“It’s just not accurate. Look at the whole lawsuit,” fumed de Blasio. “It was not directed at him. He was not a subject of it. He wasn’t a defendant. It’s clear as a bell. Of course we studied this.”
Lehrer pushed back by noting that the suit accused Carranza of retaliation, saying: “But was the allegation not against him, for retaliating against her?”
And de Blasio blew his stack again, just as he had a week earlier when discussing the same suit with Lehrer on Lehrer’s show on March 9.
“It wasn’t against him. Brian, I don’t know how many times I have to say it to you, and I really don’t think it’s fair,” he said. “Look, the Daily News has an ax to grind here, let’s be very clear about that, and I wish it was about the facts, but I don’t think it is.”
In fact, the suit brought by Chavez against San Francisco school district over the actions of Carranza mentions Carranza by name multiple times and gives a description of his alleged acts.
The suit claimed Chavez was an assistant superintendent when she and Carranza attended a weekend education conference in Los Angeles in February 2013.
“During this weekend, Chavez observed Carranza, who is a married man, engaging in inappropriate flirtatious conduct with a female colleague from another school district who was not his wife,” the suit said.
When Chavez raised the issue with Carranza, he allegedly wrecked her career.
“Carranza retaliated against and subjected Chavez to a hostile work environment,” and passed Chavez over for an executive director job as payback, the suit said.
Carranza, who has remarried since the 2013 conference in Los Angeles, has refused to comment on the matter.
After the interview, a spokeswoman for the mayor insisted he wasn’t questioning the accuracy of The News’ report, and suggested de Blasio was disagreeing with the allegations contained in the lawsuit.
“He wasn’t saying that the Daily News was wrong, just that you shouldn’t believe every single thing you read in any media outlet, including these false allegations,” said the rep, Olivia Lapeyrolerie.
WNYC listeners weren’t buying the mayor’s defense of Carranza in comments they made on Twitter.
“‘An ax to grind’ a public airing of fairly serious charges, particularly post-Weinstein. Give me and a robust, responsible free press a break, @NYCMayor,” tweeted a Bronx resident who goes by the handle “Tim Positive Subway Tweets Smith.” of our Law Department, it sadly is not as straightforward as that,” de Blasio said. “I will certainly go back and look again, and talk to our lawyers again, because I think this is a matter of injustice that has to be addressed.”
De Blasio has been widely criticized for failing to act on his promises to diversify the schools.
Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams called on de Blasio on Friday to conduct a thorough public review of the admissions processes for the schools, and how they might be changed.
"Black and Latino children in this city deserve nothing less than the same high-quality education as their peers, and City Hall owes them nothing less than a high-quality public review,” Adams said.
And Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz Jr. issued a statement Friday calling for an end to the use of a single test as the schools' sole admission criteria.
“A single test should no longer decide which students have access to our best high schools," he said.