A chancellor’s principles
N
ine weeks into the job but who’s counting, Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza visited the Daily News Editorial Board last week. We like the way he talks and respectfully note, as a teacher might, that words must be followed by deeds.
His predecessor Carmen Fariña, a spirit animal and educational hero of Mayor de Blasio, had a penchant for sidestepping politically uncomfortable topics. Carranza is happy to stare down, if not carve up and grill, sacred cows.
The biggest one: confronting segregation that is shamefully persistent in the nation’s largest and most diverse school system. Despite a backlash that followed a late-night tweet last month, Carranza didn’t back down from his intense criticism of Upper West Side parents caught on video harshly criticizing a new plan to bring more struggling students into their middle school.
“What appalled me was not what was being said necessarily but what was being said about kids,” he told us, while forcefully rejecting the notion that integration is a zero-sum exercise whereby whiter and wealthier kids pay the price for opening doors of opportunity to poorer kids from disadvantaged backgrounds.
Correct — but there are no points for courage. Only intelligently designed integration plans, ably communicated to New York parents of all backgrounds, can move the ball.
Another promising break from the past came in his approach to the Department of Education’s perpetual investigation into academic standards of yeshivas, Jewish schools that too often fail to teach their students the basics in math, English, science and other core topics. Carranza noted that recently passed state law that loosens standards will complicate enforcement, but he pledges “transparency” as the probe nears an absurd three-year mark.
He must be held to that promise, producing a detailed report on exactly where city investigators went, and exactly what they found. And soon; the department got too many extensions already. Even if yeshivas can’t be forced by government to improve their secular instruction, the public has a right to know the quality of the job they’re doing.
Finally, his rhetoric suggests a thaw in the city’s cold war with charter schools. He embraces their status as public schools and insists they will be judged on the merits of how well their classrooms and school cultures work, not viewed through the overly ideological lens de Blasio employs. Carranza even struck a middle ground with respect to mayoral nemesis Eva Moskowitz’s Success Academy schools — the city’s largest charter network and, by state test scores, its most successful, by a mile.
While admitting “I don’t know enough about Success Academies,” he said he was looking forward to visiting them.
He should invite his boss to tag along.