N.Y.C. Schools Chief to Resign After Clashes Over Desegregation (Published 2021)
Richard Carranza’s departure, planned for mid-March, comes after repeated clashes with Mayor Bill de Blasio over how to desegregate the city’s schools.
N.Y.C. Schools Chief to Resign After Clashes Over Desegregation
Richard Carranza’s departure, planned for mid-March, comes after repeated clashes with Mayor Bill de Blasio over how to desegregate the city’s schools.
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Chancellor of N.Y.C. Schools to Resign
Richard A. Carranza, chancellor of New York City public schools, said on Friday he would resign in March. The move follows repeated clashes between the chancellor and Mayor Bill de Blasio on school desegregation policy.
“To all my colleagues at the Department of Education, it is incredibly hard to say goodbye to you. And in my culture, we don’t say goodbye. We say as hasta luego — until we see you again. You’re the most dedicated, hardworking colleagues I have ever had the privilege of working with. And it’s been my privilege to be your colleague. I know the pandemic has not been easy for you or for any New Yorker. And make no mistake, I am a New Yorker. Well, not by birth, by choice, a New Yorker who has lost — a New Yorker who has lost 11 family and close childhood friends to this pandemic. And a New Yorker who, quite frankly, needs to take time to grieve. I feel that I can take that time now because of the place that we are, we are in and the work that we have done together. We have stabilized the system in a way that no one thought possible. The light, my fellow New Yorkers, is truly at the end of the tunnel.” “Primarily, as chancellor, my job will be to remove the barriers to direct resources where they are needed most. And communicate clearly around our shared goals and commitments at every school, in every neighborhood, in every single borough. And I think the mayor and the chancellor have already begun to make great grounds in this area. The reality is, you know, segregation exists. And I’m not going to shy away from the importance of really looking at the inequities around admissions processes and really pushing forward for ways we can create opportunities and access for all students across New York City.”
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Richard A. Carranza, chancellor of New York City public schools, said on Friday he would resign in March. The move follows repeated clashes between the chancellor and Mayor Bill de Blasio on school desegregation policy.CreditCredit...Todd Heisler/The New York Times
By Eliza Shapiro
- Feb. 26, 2021Updated 4:01 p.m. ET
Mr. Carranza, 54, will be leaving one of the most influential education jobs in America about three years after he was appointed, and just 10 months before the end of Mr. de Blasio’s second and final term.
He will be replaced by Meisha Porter, a longtime city educator and current Bronx superintendent who will become the first Black woman to lead the sprawling system, which has over 1 million students and 1,800 schools. Ms. Porter, 47, will take over as chancellor on March 15.
She will immediately face the enormous challenge of trying to fully reopen the school system this fall, perhaps the most complex and demanding task confronted by any education official in America. Only elementary and middle schools are currently open, and most children are still learning remotely full-time.
Ms. Porter, a native New Yorker, is the first Department of Education official in decades to be promoted to the role of chancellor. Still, it is unclear how long she will stay in the job. A new mayor will take office in January, and new administrations have consistently preferred to pick their own senior cabinet members.
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Meisha Porter will become chancellor next month.Credit...New York City Department of Education
“I know the pandemic has not been easy for you, or for any New Yorker. And make no mistake: I am a New Yorker — while not by birth, by choice. A New Yorker who has lost 11 family and close childhood friends to this pandemic,” Mr. Carranza said during a news conference on Friday, fighting back tears. “And a New Yorker who quite frankly needs to take time to grieve.”
Mr. Carranza was not able to usher through major desegregation policy, despite his bold declarations, and the school system does not look considerably different than it did when he took over.
He struggled to find political allies in a city he did not know well, and it sometimes showed that he was getting to know one of the most complicated bureaucracies in the country in real time. Though he tried to use his outsider status as a way to point out harsh truths about inequities in the system, that effort sometimes alienated him from public school families.
But Mr. Carranza did play a major role in ensuring that New York City was the first large district in the country to fully reopen schools, if only temporarily, last fall. The chancellor has maintained better relations than Mr. de Blasio with some officials in the powerful teachers’ union, and that helped him negotiate reopening agreements.
“Richard Carranza was a real partner in our efforts to open school safely,” said Michael Mulgrew, the president of the United Federation of Teachers. “Too often he had to fight behind the scenes to keep the needs of students, staff and their families ahead of politics.”
Mr. Carranza’s announcement follows years of tension with the mayor involving major decisions. The chancellor and other senior education officials sometimes felt that their expertise was overruled or disregarded by Mr. de Blasio, who runs the school district under mayoral control.
The two men repeatedly clashed over school desegregation policy in particular.
Mr. Carranza vowed from his first day as chancellor to tackle entrenched segregation in the city’s schools, while the mayor has largely avoided even using the word. New York is home to one of the most segregated public school districts in the nation, a problem that has worsened over the last few decades as the city has introduced more selective admissions policies for elementary, middle and high school.
It became clear several months into Mr. Carranza’s tenure that the mayor and chancellor had fundamentally different approaches to the problem, particularly when it came to selective admissions policies and gifted and talented programs.
Mr. de Blasio denied that his chancellor resigned because of disagreements over integration in a radio interview on Friday, though he did not directly address similar questions when he was seated next to Mr. Carranza at a news conference earlier in the day.
The long-simmering issues came to a head earlier this month, during one heated conversation between Mr. Carranza and Mr. de Blasio over the future of gifted and talented classes, according to several people with direct knowledge of that conversation. Mr. Carranza drafted a resignation letter after that meeting, but did not immediately quit.
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Mayor Bill de Blasio and Mr. Carranza were divided on how to address segregation in the city’s public schools.Credit...Pool photo by Bebeto Matthews
At issue was whether the city should continue to sort 4-year-olds into gifted and talented classes through a selective admissions process. Mr. de Blasio had said that the city would continue to offer an admissions exam for toddlers this year, then announce a new admissions system before he leaves office in January.
Mr. Carranza had consistently said he wanted the test abandoned altogether, and that the city’s gifted program was fundamentally unfair. White and Asian-American students hold about 75 percent of seats in the city’s gifted programs, whereas Black and Latino children make up about 70 percent of the overall district.
The city will not give the test this year, but only because an education panel that typically acts as a rubber stamp for City Hall took the extremely rare step of rejecting Mr. de Blasio’s plan to offer it. The city will instead create a lottery system for young children who are recommended by their pre-kindergarten teachers or who sit for a short interview.
On Friday, Ms. Porter said she was committed to integration policies, and that she would prioritize changes to gifted and talented programs. “The reality is segregation exists and I’m not going to shy away from really looking at the inequities around admissions policies,” she said, at the same news conference.
Mr. de Blasio declared that “gifted and talented as we know it is going away,” this year. But he has not announced any policies aimed at changing the actual programs.
Mr. Carranza is the second senior cabinet member to leave Mr. de Blasio’s administration during the pandemic; health commissioner Dr. Oxiris Barbot resigned last August. She, too, feuded with the mayor over his decision-making process and said she felt increasingly marginalized.
Mr. Carranza, who led the Houston school district during Hurricane Harvey in 2017 and previously ran San Francisco’s public schools, was Mr. de Blasio’s second choice for a job that some education experts consider the second-most important in the country, after the federal education secretary.
He was hired in a hurry, after the mayor’s first choice, Alberto M. Carvalho, the superintendent in Miami, turned down the job on national television. Mr. Carranza was appointed a few days later.
From his first news conference as chancellor, it was clear that he was much more willing to speak forcefully about school segregation than his boss. And a few months after he took office, it appeared that his oratory might translate into action.
In June 2018, the mayor and chancellor announced a plan to get rid of the selective admissions exam that dictates entry into the city’s elite high schools, including Stuyvesant High School and The Bronx High School of Science.
Black and Latino students are extremely underrepresented in those schools, and low-income Asian-American children are overrepresented. Some Asian-American politicians and families were insulted that they were not consulted about the plan, and many took offense to Mr. Carranza’s clumsy defense of the proposal. “I just don’t buy into the narrative that any one ethnic group owns admission to these schools,” he said shortly after it was announced.
A major backlash to the plan, led by Asian-Americans, quickly killed the mayor and chancellor’s hopes of replacing the specialized school admissions exam. The parents who fought to keep the exam in place have since become Mr. Carranza’s harshest and most consistent critics.
Mr. de Blasio’s administration did not propose major new integration policies again — until the pandemic. Late last year, the mayor announced some changes to selective admissions policies, including abolishing a rule that gave students in some of the city’s wealthiest neighborhoods first dibs at selective high schools there.
Mr. Carranza and his senior aides had been pushing the mayor for years to get rid of that geographic preference, which applied to students living on the Upper East Side, the West Village and Tribeca. Altered admissions processes during the pandemic essentially gave Mr. de Blasio a reason to finally eliminate the rule.
Beyond conflicts on integration, the chancellor has had a habit of publicly contradicting the mayor on a range of issues.
Just a few days after he started on the job, Mr. Carranza called the idea behind the mayor’s nearly $800 million school improvement program, called Renewal, “fuzzy.” The chancellor later had to defend the program, even after the city canceled it after disappointing results.
Then, earlier this week, the chancellor encouraged families to refuse standardized testing this year, after President Biden’s administration said states would have to give exams amid the pandemic. Mr. Carranza’s stance directly contradicted the mayor’s message on test refusal.
The chancellor and mayor were aligned in pushing to open New York City classrooms last fall, after a rushed experiment in remote learning.
The mayor closed all schools in November as virus cases rose, then reopened only elementary schools in December. Middle school students returned to their classrooms earlier this week.
It is not yet clear if high school students will return to school buildings before the fall, though Ms. Porter said during Friday’s news conference that the city was “ready to go” on reopening high schools.
“We have stabilized the system in a way no one thought possible,” Mr. Carranza said on Friday. “The light is at the end of the tunnel.”
If folks want proof that it's mindset, check how well the Nigerian immigrants do. Yeah, yeah, immigrants do well across the board, but Nigerians are black and suffer from the same external factors.
