NYC’s Angry Principals

Something is amiss when the usually laid-back public-school-principals union, the Council of Supervisors and Administrators, holds a showy City Hall rally over contract issues, as it did last week. CSA’s members have been without a contract since April, but what has them furious are a myriad of initiatives from above that are endangering student safety and harming effective school management.

Chancellor Richard Carranza, recall, added a whole new level of bureaucracy. And those busy beavers are justifying their existence with make-work mandates and other micromanagement — making it harder for principals to do their real jobs.

Previous chancellors gave principals wide discretion over their budgets, hiring, space allocation, tenure decisions and student discipline. Not Carranza.

Once-simple tasks — replacing retired assistant principals, hiring school aides and allocating space — now involve new hurdles. Plus, principals have lost nearly all ability to suspend even serious troublemakers — who, CSA members say, are getting bolder.

On the space question, City Hall’s to blame: To meet Mayor de Blasio’s universal pre-K goals, district superintendents are forcing principals to OK inappropriate spaces, such as basements, for preschool classrooms.

Other directives are maddening in part because they come with little rhyme or reason: Carranza (mercifully) killed his predecessor’s Renewal initiative for trying to turn around failing schools, but hasn’t come up with anything to replace it. (His “Children’s Agenda” is all rhetoric and platitudes.)

Focused on district-level racial reengineering schemes, “culturally responsive” curricula and similar social-justice issues, Carranza’s team has yet to offer ideas (or help) on core educational issues.

Expect Carranza and de Blasio to pick a single grievance and address it by throwing more money at the schools, which already run $34 billion a year, to add new Restorative Justice counselors in hopes that solves the discipline issue.

That’s the only issue they can address without admiting their own mistakes.