The Lady or the Empty Chair
It’s looking like Schools Chancellor Carmen Fariña’s replacement will be an empty chair, at least for a while. Well, that
does fit the bill of Mayor de Blasio’s desire to hire a Fariña clone.
The chancellor is set to depart next month, but the search for a successor seems stalled. Apparently, it’s tough to match Fariña’s level of mediocrity.
National teachers-union boss Randi Weingarten reportedly vetoed at least one top candidate, Orange County, Fla., schools chief Barbara Jenkins, for being too much of a “reformer” in the mode of Bloomberg-era Chancellor Joel Klein.
And it’s getting very late for any outside candidate to start by the time Fariña exits.
On her “exit tour” of interviews with local media, the chancellor’s giving herself high marks: an A for effort, a B+ for achievement.
No wonder city schools suffer from grade inflation: Those same interviews suggest she spent most of her time visiting schools to give “attaboys” to some school leaders and to berate others for not obeying Department of Education directives.
Her main achievements, meanwhile, consist mainly of undoing Klein’s reforms.
He slashed the system’s layers of bureaucracy; she restored them. He supported public charter schools; she worked to hobble them, especially by refusing their requests for space that regular schools aren’t even using.
And where the Bloomberg team aimed to close failed schools and open new ones in the same buildings, Fariña and de Blasio gave the city the Renewal Schools effort to turn them around.
Renewal spent millions on pricey consultants and “coaches” but failed to make much difference. Even the schools that “graduated out” of the program did so by meeting laughably low achievement goals.
All of it won raves from the United Federation of Teachers, for whatever that’s worth. But the UFT will likely be pretty happy with the empty chair, too.
Sadly, the students won’t see much of a difference if the system stays on autopilot during an extended search for another lowwattage leader.