Fariña: School’s out for me
Schools Chancellor Carmen Fariña made her retirement official at City Hall Thursday, but will remain in her post until a successor is chosen in the coming months.
Joined by Mayor de Blasio, First Lady Chirlane McCray and city departmental bosses, the veteran educator said she was proud of her fouryear tenure and remained optimistic about the country’s largest school system, which administers to more than 1 million kids.
The former city principal said she was especially satisfied with her effort to improve conditions for special-education students and Englishlanguage learners.
Known for her relentless schedule of school visits, Fariña, 74, said she sought to create durable trust with rank-and-file teachers and felt she had been able to do so.
“We have managed to break ground on so many things,” Fariña said Thursday. “The thing I’m proudest of is the factact that we have brought back dignityy to teaching, joy to learning and trustt to the system.”
De Blasio — whoho had coaxed Fariña out of retirementement — lavished her with praisese Thursday.
“Her list of achievements eve men ts is extraordinary,” he said of Fariña, who headedd de Bla-Blasio’s universal pre-K and Renewal programs.
Say this for Schools Chancellor Carmen Fariña, who’s just announced she’s quitting by the end of the school year: Mayor de Blasio hired her to not shake up the system, and she delivered.
Fariña, who spent her adult life working in the system, knew all the reasons why the schools “couldn’t” do better, and regularly lectured on how it’s inevitable that any system so huge, facing so many challenges, has its lemons.
The signature effort of her term, de Blasio’s Renewal program, was a half-billiondollar exercise in seeking marginal improvement from failed schools, rather than simply shutting them down and opening new ones in their place.
She managed to set expectations low enough that just 21 of the original 94 schools “graduated” out of the program — even as plummeting enrollment and other woes forced her to close another 27 after all.
Ever a team player, she embraced the watering-down of the school-discipline code and the convenient revision of surveys that might otherwise reveal the negative impact on school safety. The first student in over a generation to die in a city school was stabbed to death on her watch.
As a principal, Fariña had refused to hire teachers from the Absent Teacher Reserve pool. As chancellor, she assented to de Blasio’s plan to foist these “educators” on schools that don’t want them, especially struggling ones.
And she oversaw the mayor’s cold war on charter schools, happily refusing classroom space to institutions that actually offer poor and minority kids the opportunity that the regular schools don’t.
Team de Blasio has already begun its search for a new chancellor. It’ll be tough to find someone who will be as diligently indifferent to a disgraceful status quo.