Back to school with chancellor
Carranza on attacks, teacher evals
As city schools prepare to reopen this week, Chancellor Richard Carranza gave a wideranging interview to The Post about everything from his controversial desegregation campaign to the spike in school sex crimes and yeshiva reform. He spoke at Department of Education headquarters in Manhattan.
DIVERSITY
The schools chief said skittish parents should feel free to debate his department’s desegregation proposals — as long as they watch their mouths.
“When you talk about ‘those kids’ and ‘ why are they’ — I think you have to be very conscious of the fact that either intentionally or unintentionally, you’re using coded language,” Carranza said.
“I think it’s important that when adults are having those conversations — when you’re using that kind of coded language — I think you have to have it pointed out.”
Carranza sprinted into the school-segregation quagmire within weeks of his appointment in March when he retweeted a story that ripped pampered white parents for questioning his department’s diversity initiatives.
Aiming to get more black and Latino students into longstanding Asian and white strongholds, the department is introducing special admissions plans in a number of schools and districts.
“I don’t think there’s a need for any one type of student or student group to have to be with another group to find value in themselves,” Carranza countered. “I don’t believe that at all. What I think the more fundamental issue is, we have a public-school system that is using mechanisms to sort kids that smack of a private school.”
ADMISSIONS
Carranza decried the murky admissions criteria at desirable schools that often seem wrapped in mystery.
“We’re looking into all of that,” Carranza said, declining to give specifics. “I want to have a good understanding of all the systems and structures as much as I can.”
PRIVATE DONATIONS
The schools chief said parental donations to public schools in affluent areas — which have built seven-figure pots and fund entire programs in some cases — also have commanded his attention.
Critics have said that the independent funding gives an unfair advantage to public-school students in higher socioeconomic areas and that there should be a cap on the amount of money garnered or even an elimination of the fund-raising.
SCHOOL SEX CRIMES
Carranza addressed the sharp spike in both minor and severe school-related sex crimes in recent years, including a 138 percent rise in student felony arrests last year.
“Students are a product of their environment they are exposed to, and I think we have a hypersexualized environment,” Carranza said.
He also theorized that the steadily worsening statistics could stem from increased awareness spurred by the #MeToo movement.
Carranza said the department is providing more money for its sex-ed programs to better educate the kids. But he said their home life is important, too.
“I think that’s where parents have a big role to play in terms of being in their kids’ business, knowing where they are going, what they are looking at,” he said.
YESHIVA ACCOUNTABILITY
After releasing a status report on an investigation into curricular quality at city yeshivas, Carranza added no entity that takes public money is above the law.
“If you are taking the public dollar then you are also agreeing to then meet standards not only of accountability, but standards of what curriculums should look like,” Carranza said.
TEACHER EVALUATIONS
Carranza said he will fight to exclude test scores from the evaluation process for teachers, although he supports standardized state exams to gauge student progress.
“If you’re a teacher and you have to pay your mortgage, if you have to pay your rent, and 40 percent of your evaluation is going to be based on how your students do on a test, you can’t blame somebody for saying, ‘I’m going to make sure they know what’s going to be tested,’ ” he said.
While Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza spends much of his time railing about “bias,” the dysfunctional system he oversees is leaving medically needy special-ed kids twisting in the wind — and it’s just that kind of dysfunction that hurts poor minorities the most.
As The Post reported, federal Judge William Pauley III last week let a lawsuit against the Department of Education proceed, ripping the DOE as a “cumbersome and counter-intuitive bureaucracy” whose failure to coordinate nursing and transportation services for four disabled kids forced them to miss class for much of the school year.
That put it mildly. Letting kids go without school for so long is beyond outrageous. And while the lawsuit names only four children, Advocates for Children lawyers say “the entire system is broken.” No doubt.
The problem in a nutshell: The DOE is so complex and disjointed that parents are often stuck with big problems that are nearimpossible to navigate.
In the case of the special-ed kids, the process of approving and coordinating services is split among three offices (for special-ed, health and transportation) and the schools themselves. Yet there’s no mechanism for the offices and schools to work together to ensure all i’s get dotted and t’s crossed.
All the DOE had to do to get these kids what they needed was 1) approve applications, 2) arrange for bus service and 3) contract for nurses to accompany the kids to and from school. Yet it fumbled that.
One parent told The Post that her 8-yearold son, who suffers from severe seizures, missed kindergarten for two years because he never got the “bus nurse” the DOE arranged for him.
Such problems aren’t limited to special-ed kids. The DOE bureaucracy, shielded by its very complexity, stymies parents on a host of fronts. And kids of poor parents — who lack the time, money or know-how to overcome those hurdles — suffer most.
Instead of railing about the supposed implicit-bias of white parents, maybe Carranza should focus on cutting red tape, easing the burden on parents and getting schools to function properly.