Give Chancellor Richard Carranza credit for honesty, but his recent sit-down with The Post should remove all doubt: He’s woefully unfit to head the city’s schools.
Start with his obscene charge, as The Post’s Selim Algar and Bruce Golding reported Tuesday, that the admission test for the elite high schools is “racist” and anyone who backs the 1971 law behind it is “supporting a racist law.”
Huh? The exam results in Stuyvesant High School, the city’s top public high school, having a student body that’s majority Asian. That’s a bizarre outcome for a racist plot.
Just as odd as the earlier “racist” systems that decades ago produced overwhelmingly Jewish classes at the top schools. For that matter: As The Post’s Sue Edelman has reported, “from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s, black and Hispanic kids made up close to half or more of the Brooklyn Tech student body.” Tech is an elite school, too.
Yet Carranza professes himself “surprised” that many here don’t see the racism he does: “That’s not the New York that I thought I was coming to — New York, the blue of the blue, liberal, progressive.”
Does he know nothing of the real world? Any cosmopolitan city hosts a huge range of opinion — a fifth of this town voted for Donald Trump in 2016.
He also expresses horror at some parents, such as one who asked if plans to lower admission standards to boost “diversity” at the city’s top high schools would make it harder for kids to get into top colleges.
“As a man of color,” Carranza claims, he was offended — pretending the question assumes that elite universities would frown on graduates of high schools with “a diverse student body.”
Hearing such notions, he complains, is “a cross that I bear as chancellor.” What a twit.
We guarantee that the parent wasn’t worried that Harvard works that way. Rather, the all-too-sound fear is that Carranza’s policies will make the top schools less rigorous, and so less of a feeder to Yale and the rest.
Yes, black and Hispanic achievement lags. But rather than working to improve the schools that teach those kids — or getting out of the way of the charter schools that do reduce the achievement gap — Carranza is obsessed with finding racism in a system run from top to bottom by blue-of-the-blue liberal progressives. He’s pathetic.