An Injustice Carranza’s Ignoring

For all Chancellor Richard Carranza’s railing about racial injustice in the city school system, he’s doing squat about clear racial inequities for New York’s most vulnerable kids: toddlers in need of special education.

Maya Miller and Laura Laderman did a major expose on the issue for The City last week. They showed that children in low-income, minority neighborhoods are the least likely to be referred for the screenings needed to get timely Early Intervention services to address disabilities and developmental delays such as autism.

Under federal law, every child who needs it is entitled to free speech therapy and similar services — but first parents have to get the system to acknowledge the need.

Analysis by Advocates for Children and the Citizens’ Committee for Children found that the more black and Hispanic children in a neighborhood’s referral base, the lower the overall rates of evaluation. That raises the odds that those kids will get services early, when they can make the biggest difference.

A child’s first three years are a period of rapid cognitive, linguistic, social, emotional and motor development. It’s an especially critical time for children with autism and other developmental disabilities.

Earlier this year, The City’s Yoav Gonen detailed how the DOE has failed to deliver on its commitment to give special-needs children the help they need. Instead, the city pays out hundreds of millions a year to settle thousands of cases brought over its failure to deliver special-ed services.

Now comes news that black children are less likely to receive vital early-intervention services than white children.

If Carranza and the mayor really want to achieve “equity and excellence for all,” they should set aside their divisive drive to racially re-engineer the city’s middle and high schools, and focus on fairness for the city’s youngest, most vulnerable children.