Quick study

New Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza hasn’t had time to do much yet, but he is talking. He gave a long interview to NY1 News last week, and we like some of what we heard. Like his predecessor Carmen Fariña, Carranza has little patience for parents who magnify their kids’ anxiety over state tests by opting out of exams that are the only objective way to measure student learning. He called the movement “an extreme reaction.” Yep.

On the $500 million-plus, deeply checkered de Blasio Renewal program to turn around struggling schools, Carranza sounded open to changing strategies, asking, “Where have the results been mixed and how do we change strategies or how do we update our strategy?” Right question.

On one of Fariña’s biggest black marks, the city’s long-stalled probe into whether private yeshivas are teaching the basics, as required under law, he committed to being “very transparent in terms of where the investigation is and what the next steps in the investigation are.” Tell us more.

And unlike Fariña, who rarely even used the word “segregation,” Carranza candidly addressed the shamefully Balkanized state of city schools. And said, unambiguously, that “if (there is) segregation, then we need to work to end it.”

Relatedly, he decried the fact that precious few blacks and Latinos get into the city’s specialized high schools, bluntly asking, “How is that OK?”

What matters far more than rhetoric is what policy solutions he arrives at, and how able a manager he proves to be. But so far, the new kid seems OK.