Carranza’s Confusion
Well, that didn’t take long: Just two weeks into his new job as the city’s schools chancellor, Richard Carranza has already discovered the truth about Mayor de Blasio’s Renewal-schools program: It’s a sham.
No, he didn’t use those words exactly. But in a Chalkbeat interview last week, Carranza hit the nail squarely on the head: Without clear principles for Renewal schools, it’s “difficult to talk about what are the outcomes that we’re looking for.”
Instead, he lamented, every time he asks about the program’s vision — its “theory of action” — he gets “different answers.”
No surprise there: Fact is, de Blasio never actually set firm rules for the 94 Renewal failure factories, other than that they must be bathed in new cash and that their staffs, by and large, mustn’t be inconvenienced.
Sure, when the mayor unveiled the program with a $150 million price tag in 2014, he promised to “demand fast and intense improvement” at the schools and warned of “consequences” for failure. “If we do not see improvement after three years,” he vowed, “we will close any schools that don’t measure up.”
Ha! Nearly four years later, most are as rotten as ever. Indeed, at some, barely any of the students can meet state standards for math and English. Yet de Blasio has shuttered just a few. Others have been merged or deemed good enough, despite their poor performance, to “graduate” out of the program.
Most continue to struggle along, in one form or another, as their students languish.
And as for that $150 million cost, it has already ballooned to nearly $600 million, with another $150 million to be spent soon.
It’s certainly notable that the new kid in town was instantly able to spot a fatal flaw in de Blasio’s program. Alas, Carranza has no plans to scrap it: Hey, why upset the apple cart and anger school staff by closing chronically failing schools ASAP?
The new chancellor’s confusion was also on display in his Saturday remarks to the National Action Network. Carranza rightly noted that the system is failing black and Hispanic kids: “Every indicator that should be going down isn’t going down.”
But he also endorsed politically correct thinking by lumping together “disproportionate suspension rates, disproportionate rates of exclusion from schools [and] disproportionate rates of children identified as gifted and talented.” That implies that all these very different, and complex, issues are simply the result of racism — in a system whose teachers and administrators are overwhelmingly liberal or progressive.
Until Carranza is willing to face the way the system is run to benefit the adults, not the kids, he’ll never turn anything around.