Carranza speeds up bias fight

Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza promised to fasttrack anti-bias lessons for city educators at an anti-bias seminar for teachers in Brooklyn Wednesday.

At the volunteer anti-bias session for about 100 educators at Brooklyn Law School, Carranza said the city would seek to provide lessons in culturally responsive education within two years’ time, not four, as originally planned.

“When my colleagues said we have a four-year implementation plan, I said, ‘Thank you, come back with a two-year implementation program,’ ” Carranza said. “So within two years, it is the goal that we will have trained every single one of the souls that touch kids’ lives.”

Mayor de Blasio set aside $23 million for anti-bias training for city educators in April, prompted by a series of Daily News stories on accusations of racism in schools that ignited protests around the city.

The city completed a probe of one of the accused educators – former Bronx Middle School 118 teacher Patricia Cummings – but won’t share the investigation’s findings with the public until the fall.

Meanwhile, statistics released by the city Tuesday show that the larger undertaking to diversify the elite city high schools is failing to move the needle.

Stats provided by Education Department officials show that mostly Asian and white kids benefited from the city’s Discovery Program in 2018 — which is intended to boost black and Hispanic enrollment.

The program, which sets aside 250 seats in specialized high schools for students who nearly made the cutoff on the exam used for admissions, enrolled 75% Asian and white kids, despite those kids accounting for roughly 30% of the overall student population.

Black and Hispanic kids accounted for about 22% of enrollment in the Discovery Program, despite those kids accounting for nearly 70% of all students in the public schools.

Education Department officials said they would alter the program in 2019 to focus on a more diverse group of students.