Don’t Let Carranza Off the Hook

It’s beyond outrageous that the city Department of Education isn’t investigating exChancellor Richard Carranza’s evident abuses in light of news that he’s been shacking up for months with the now-former DOE staffer he hired for a six-figure job in 2018, whose salary rose from $149,000 in 2018 to $156,274 in 2020.

The Post’s Susan Edelman broke the news that Carranza had left his wife and was sharing a luxury high-rise condo in San Antonio with gal pal Raquel Sosa — who worked remotely before quitting last month.

After exiting the DOE last March, Carranza went to work for education-tech firm IXL Learning, which the DOE has paid at least $4 million for software and instructional materials. Under city Conflict of Interest Board rules, he was obliged to not engage with school officials on behalf of IXL for one year. Yet Sosa was senior director for development, support and implementation in the DOE Office of Curriculum, Instruction and Professional Learning.

John Kaehny of the good-government group Reinvent Albany told The Post that if Carranza is violating conflict-of-interest rules, then he should pay a price: “Otherwise, the law becomes meaningless.”

For all his regular slams of white and Asian parents for being “privileged” and showing “implicit bias” for wanting challenging curricula for their children, Carranza evidently was exercising privilege of power to import his lover and set her up in a lucrative DOE sinecure — at taxpayer expense.

As Bob McManus noted on these pages last week, the sorry Carranza saga is fresh proof of the ugly truth about city government: “The well-connected benefit; the poor and the powerless, not so much.” Will City Hall really let the ex-chancellor get away with it?