New King needed

At a tenuous moment for New York’s schools, a warrior for higher standards and better instruction is leaving his post as the state’s top education official. The Board of Regents, led by Chancellor Merryl Tisch, must find a replacement with as much foresight and backbone as repeatedly exhibited by Commissioner John King.

In the 2011, King brought a powerful biography to the post. After losing both of his parents to illness by age 12, he went on with the help of an excellent public-school education (PS 276 in Brooklyn) to Harvard, Yale and Columbia. Then, he led stellar charter schools.

Most important, along the way, King built a successful game plan to help kids, and especially low-income kids, master tougher material.

This was imperative. Only a third of high school students statewide were leaving school equipped to handle college or careers. Citywide, a fifth met that standard. Yet most were passing state tests.

King led New York in leaping into the more difficult Common Core standards.

When test scores cratered, finally reflecting the embarrassing reality of how little kids were actually learning, the backlash was severe. King did not yield. Having withstood the onslaught — and a craven attempt by the Republican gubernatorial candidate to ride it to victory this year — the higher standards are, all should hope, here to stay.

Whoever sits next in King’s chair must press ahead, undaunted, to ensure that the new standards are smartly implemented across the state.

Following an attempt to rate teacher performance that, thanks to teacher-union pressure, has turned into mush, King’s successor must smartly answer Gov. Cuomo’s call to create “a more rigorous evaluation system.”

And since the winds of reform have reversed in New York City — where a mayor and chancellor want to unravel more than a decade of increasing public-school choice and heightened accountability for teachers and principals — the next commissioner must hold the line.

When schools are chronically failing their students, he or she must ensure that they are rapidly phased out — and that their kids are rescued, not strung along year after year.

A generation from now, when we look back on the history of New York’s public schools, King’s tenure must stand not as a courageous but anomalous blip, but as the start of a revolution.