SCHOOLS BOSS HITS FOES ON DIVERSITY PLAN:
CITY SCHOOLS Chancellor Richard Carranza had a message Tuesday for activists who oppose an overhaul of the city’s specialized public high schools where Asians are a majority: You don’t own those classrooms.
Speaking on Fox 5’s “Good Day New York” Tuesday morning, Carranza said Asian groups opposing the proposed changes had better make room for black and Hispanic kids, who currently account for just a fraction of enrollment at the world-famous schools.
Under a plan to combat extreme racial segregation in top city schools, including Bronx High School of Science, Brooklyn Technical High School and Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan, black and Hispanic kids will gain a greater share of the coveted seats.
The plan has angered parents who say their children earned the spots. But Carranza told the Fox News hosts that desegregating the city’s premier public high schools is a moral imperative.
“I just don’t buy into the narrative that any one ethnic group owns admission to these schools,” he said.
“We are systematically excluding students in the most diverse city in the world from opportunities,” the chancellor added. “In this particular case, specialized schools. I think we have a moral obligation.”
Currently, just one in 10 students enrolled in the specialized high schools is black or Hispanic, even though those kids account for nearly 70% of all public school students.
By contrast, Asian kids make up about 62% of students in the specialized high schools, even though they account for only about 16% of the overall student body.
Mayor de Blasio and Carranza want to transform the specialized schools to better reflect the diverse character of the city by doing away with admissions based on a single test.
De Blasio would have the state Legislature replace the test with rigid rules that admit the top 7% of eighth-graders from each and every one of the city’s 600 middle schools.
Asian groups protested in Brooklyn on Monday against the proposed changes and rallied again at City Hall on Tuesday, urging the mayor to keep the test.
Speaking at an unrelated press conference in Midtown, Gov. Cuomo said the controversial plan to desegregate schools would figure into a debate over who gets to control the city’s schools when a deal giving de Blasio the reins expires in 2019.
“I’m saying that mayoral control is a very controversial, complex topic,” Cuomo said. “This issue of specialized high schools will become one of the topics in that broad agenda.”
But de Blasio said Tuesday that he doesn’t believe the specialized high schools should be tied to mayoral control, which in recent years has devolved into a political tug-of-war in Albany each time it goes up for extension.
“It does become a political fight and it shouldn’t be a political fight,” he said, when reporters asked him about the matter at an unrelated press conference at Police Headquarters.
“That debate should be about what’s going to help our kids the most, it should not be politicized,” de Blasio added. “Nor should, of course, the question of how we create equal access to high-quality education. I think they’re two separate matters.”