Sunday’s Post put a hard figure on the price of Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza’s new layer of bureaucracy: $2.5 million a year for nine “executive superintendent” posts. But the same day’s paper also revealed that Carranza doesn’t remotely understand the system he’s trying to reshape.
Last week, the chancellor blasted 80 high schools for screening kids based on test scores and grades, claiming it’s racially biased and leads to “segregation” — i.e., it cheats minority kids out of better schools.
“The system of screens, the system of selectivity, the system of privilege that determines which kids get to go where,” argues Carranza, “it’s segregating our schools.”
Yet as The Post’s Susan Edelman reports, Department of Education figures show that 63 percent of kids at these schools are black or Hispanic — close to their share of the overall city school population, 68 percent. So where’s the segregation?
Even at 31 high-performing screened high schools, 42 percent were black or Hispanic, education consultant David Rubel found.
At some, like Brooklyn’s Benajmin Banneker Academy, minorities are as much as 93 percent of the kids. Banneker boasts a high graduation rate, 92 percent — and 60 percent of its grads score as college-ready, vs. the citywide 37 percent rate. Again, where’s the bias?
“The DOE data fly in the face of the chancellor’s negative comments on screened schools,” says Rubel. The real problem, he notes, is that there aren’t enough seats at good screened schools to meet demand.
Actually, there aren’t enough good schools of any type. Which is why affluent whites send kids to private school (or move out of town), leaving the public schools with a disproportionate share of minorities.
No matter. Carranza’s intent on blaming school failure on imaginary racism. Hmm: That fits in nicely with his description of his new, $2.5 million layer of managers, which he calls “streamlining.”
If he really wants to help black and Hispanic kids — indeed, all kids — he’ll focus on creating more good schools, not on bureaucratic empire-building or divisive and dishonest blame games.