Bureaucrats to the Rescue

Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza is reshuffling deck chairs again, this time with a plan to shake up top staff at the Department of Education. Maybe one of these days he’ll get around to keeping city schools from sinking.

Carranza is planning a new layer of bureaucrats, including positions for nine “executive superintendents,” a chief academic officer, a chancellor for school climate and a deputy chancellor for community. (Don’t say Team de Blasio isn’t doing its share for job creation — even if the new posts cost taxpayers $2 million-plus.)

Kids, on the other hand, are left completely out of the equation. Again.

“A key tenet of any plan is that we must have clear lines of accountability,” Carranza says. “We must also make sure that we double down on our priorities and continue to make our commitment to equity and excellence visible both in word and deed.”

That will sound swell to anyone who enjoys bureaucratic gobbledygook, but how about simply concentrating on what is supposed to be the schools’ main mission: putting information into kids’ heads?

More depressing: His effort to “streamline” the department follows a similar restructuring by his predecessor, Carmen Fariña, not long after she took office. Carranza clearly thinks Fariña failed, and he’s right. But why think he’ll do any better?

Alas, ever since he became chancellor in April, Carranza — like his boss, Mayor de Blasio — has steered clear of any shifts that could truly make a difference for kids, like figuring out how to shed poor-performing teachers or reward great ones. Or closing schools that don’t work. Or even just making space for successful charter schools, as state law requires.

Instead, he’s pushed plans to “diversify” schoolhouses and scrap or reduce the role of the admissions test for the city’s elite high schools, hinting that Asian Americans, who make up a disproportionate share of those schools, might — and should — lose seats.

No “one ethnic group owns admission” to these schools, he warned.

Now he’s moving around squares on an organizational chart. True, he has been chancellor for only a few months. But for kids, the clock is ticking.