Carranza’s Ethnic Errors

Richard Carranza won’t last as schools chancellor if he can’t develop a better feel for the city’s ethnic realities.

His latest rebuke came last week in resolutions from three community education councils (two in Queens, one in Brooklyn) condemning the plan to remake admissions to the city’s elite high schools.

All three districts host large Asian-American populations — and middle schools that regularly send hundreds of eighth-graders to the elite high schools. All are outraged at the drive by Carranza and Mayor de Blasio to replace the current admissions test with a system of barely disguised racial quotas.

They’re also furious that Carranza sanctimoniously said he doesn’t “buy into the narrative that any one ethnic group owns admission to these schools.” They don’t think they own anything — they know their kids

earn their achievements, as individuals. They also see the hypocrisy in Carranza’s pandering to ethnic powerbrokers in one of his first decisions, reversing the planned closure of Harlem’s Wadleigh Secondary School.

Over the weekend, The New York Times reported on how problematic that call may prove. Not a single Wadleigh student passed the state math exam in 2015, ’16 or ’17. And Carranza’s main idea for improving those results is for Wadleigh to get advice from a colocated school that manages a pass rate of just 30 percent. Yet he’s vowed the school’s critics will learn “just how good we can be.”

All this, on top of denouncing critics of the controversial District 3 middle-school diversity plan for their “implicit bias.”

Beware, Mr. Chancellor: Routinely playing the race card will earn you far more enemies than friends.