Push for equity ‘in everything’
As schools gear to open, boss eyes big retool
Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza is fired up for the new school year that starts on Wednesday.
“There’s nothing more energetic than the start of the school year,” he said in an exclusive interview with the Daily News. “Things are moving at a really fast pace.”
Carranza, 51, is a veteran educator from Arizona who just started the city’s top schools job in April.
His appointment was clouded early on by the rejection of the post by Mayor de Blasio’s first choice for chancellor, Miami superintendent Albert Carvalho.
And before Carranza even started the job, the Daily News reported that Carranza’s actions were at the center of a sexual harassment suit settled by his previous employers at the San Francisco Unified School District.
But Carranza’s relatively aggressive and plainspoken approach to hot-button issues including school segregation has already set him apart from his predecessor, Carmen Fariña.
And with his first full instructional year on the job about to commence, Carranza vowed to tackle the glaring inequalities in the nation’s largest school system.
Kids from poor families, and black and Hispanic students, face daunting achievement gaps in the city school system while racial segregation is the norm in many classrooms.
Despite those well-documented and longstanding challenges, Carranza said he’s going to create a more level playing field for all city students in his first full school year on the job.
“We’re pushing for equity in the programs we have,” he said. “Equity in the way we administer funding, equity in opportunities for students, equity in placing programs, equity in everything we’re doing.”
The city’s school system is admired around the world for the excellence of some of its programs and the variety of options presented by roughly 1,800 free, public schools open to city students and families.
But city and state data has shown for years that wealthier students, and white and Asian kids, reap many of the benefits of those offerings.
And this is happening despite the fact that about 75% of city students are poor enough to qualify for free or reduced price lunches, and black and Hispanic kids account for about 67% of total enrollment.
The inequalities are particularly stark in the city’s elite specialized high schools, where only 4.1% of admissions offers went to black students and 6.3% to Hispanic kids in 2018.
Carranza, the grandson of Mexican immigrants and the son of a sheetmetal worker and a hairdresser, said he wants to build a more equitable system by rethinking the way students are admitted to schools.
“We’re looking at the whole system,” Carranza said. “It’s a ground-up, community-based approach to examining options for students.”
Citywide, about 60% of public school kindergartners attend their zoned schools, and the portion of students in higher grades who attend their neighborhood schools is far smaller. Only about 10% of high school students attend their zoned schools.
Many students who don’t attend their zoned schools apply to screened schools where they’re admitted on the basis of factors including in-person interviews, academic performance and attendance rates.
Those screened slots account for about 60% of the overall system and they’re concentrated in many of the city’s most sought-after schools.
Those are the schools Carranza is eyeing for change.
“You don’t have a choice if you have a series of barriers to students being able to select schools,” Carranza said.
“Think about this,” he added. “To get into a public middle school that you may live around the corner from, you have to interview, you have to show your grades, you have to show your attendance. Sounds to me like a private school.”
In the coming year Carranza said he’d be examining changes to those systems to create a more equal system where all kids have access to good schools.
“We’re taking a really deep look at all the processes,” he said.