You’re a racist, and so are you. All of you are racists.
Why? Because you disagree with me.
Thus sayeth the Lord High Richard Carranza, the chief racial bean counter at the world’s largest failure factory, the New York City Department of Education.
Carranza is marking his first anniversary as chancellor by throwing gasoline on the fires of racial resentment. His bonfire is disappointing, even heartbreaking, but proves beyond doubt that he has no commitment to anything else, and never really did.
Claims that he was an educational Mr. Fixit have evaporated. The nitty-gritty work and the courageous decisions required to make bad schools better and good schools great do not interest him.
A self-described “man of color,” he has reduced everything to black and white.
Yet his record is hardly one of achievement. In 2016, when he left San Francisco schools after seven years, including the last four as the top superintendent, just 19 percent of black students were at grade level in English and 13 percent in math, according to a report.
He then went to Houston, and left after less than 18 months to fill the hole when Mayor de Blasio’s first pick for the city job bailed out. Some Houston officials were furious he skipped out so early — but in hindsight, they were lucky he didn’t have time to do real damage.
Carranza came to New York knowing little about the city, and doesn’t appear to have learned much. In an anniversary interview with Post reporters, he said he was surprised that not everybody in New York shared his vision.
“Because that’s not the New York that I thought I was coming to — New York, the blue of the blue, liberal, progressive. You know — New York,” he said.
He doesn’t explain his definition of liberal, but it’s obvious he expected every one here to agree with him that the city’s eight elite high schools are bastions of racism.
His calculations are as simple as groupthink can be: because black and Latino students don’t do nearly as well as white and Asian students on the single-entry test, the test is racist.
By that simplistic standard, so are the standards for playing for the Yankees and the Knicks.
Carranza is genial enough, but deeply misguided. He told The Post he had studied the background of a 1971 law requiring the test at Stuyvesant, Bronx Science and Brooklyn Tech and concluded that while the test had long existed, the law requiring it was an attempt to keep the schools white.
“I’ve done my homework,” he said. “It was put into state law to stop the diversification efforts . . . It was a halt to that process.”
He went on to say, “So from my very humble perspective . . . anyone who is supporting that law — you are supporting a racist law.”
From my experience, humble people don’t apply the racist tag in a wholesale manner. So his homework needs major improvement.
For one thing, if the tests and the law were designed to keep the elite schools white, they failed miserably.
When the law passed, the top three schools were predominately white. Today, they are about 21 percent white and 67 percent Asian-American.
The test did, and continues to, impose a single standard. Racially and ethnically, those who meet that standard have shifted over time, which is an argument that the test really is color-blind.
For another thing, Carranza seems to know little about the great schools upheaval of the late 1960’s and early ’70s. Teacher strikes, disputes over local control, rising anti-Semitism and growing violence in the city and schools all contributed to fears that the system was about to explode.
Equally important, the City University system, addressing claims it was racially biased, threw open its doors to all high school graduates. The open-admissions experiment nearly destroyed the university over the next 30 years as standards were eliminated, and good students and faculty shunned it like the plague.
If Carranza knows any of this history, he has failed to learn its lessons. Instead, to judge from his comments about the 1971 law, he adopted the thinking directly from an obituary of Harvey Scribner, an unpopular chancellor of that period whose contract was not renewed because of the chaos.
That obituary appeared in the New York Times on Dec. 24th, 2002. It was written by Jayson Blair.
Carranza probably doesn’t know that name, either. He should look it up.
Even better, he should study the life of the late Herman Badillo. Born in Puerto Rico and an orphan by age 5, Badillo came to New York and proved himself worthy of any challenge academia had to offer.
He graduated from City College in 1951 and in 1954 got his law degree from Brooklyn Law School, finishing first in his class.
Badillo became the first Puerto Rican-born congressman, a borough president, deputy mayor and a repeat candidate for mayor. But his finest hour in public service came as chairman of the CUNY Board of Trustees under Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Gov. George Pataki.
Badillo, through skill and the commanding power of his own life story, led the way to rescinding open admissions and saved CUNY from the curse of good intentions.
Carranza could get all of this from Badillo’s memoir, “One Nation, One Standard.” It makes the case for excellence and the compelling argument that Latinos and other nonwhites are actually harmed by quotas and lower standards.
One color-blind standard for all. Imagine that. Carranza should try it sometime.
Privileged newbies
“Who do these rookies think they are?”
That’s the money quote from a Wall Street Journal article that reveals the reality of young office workers: they come in the door wanting perks and promotions from the get-go.
I’ve heard similar stories for some time and the Journal piece has them all. Be prepared to be outraged — and amazed at how college snowflakes are now corporate snowflakes.
Dems mything in action on very real border crisis
The news from the southern border only gets worse. A top federal official told the Senate Tuesday that illegal immigrants from 50 different countries — 50! — had been caught crossing into the United States. They include people from China, Bangladesh, Turkey, Egypt and Romania.
But not to worry. It’s not a crisis. Just ask your favorite local Democrats.
Like Sgt. Schultz from “Hogan’s Heroes,” they see nothing, they know nothing.
Foes’ ‘dem’entia
The insistence by some on the left that President Trump is guilty of treason, no matter what Robert Mueller’s report says, rings a bell for reader Harold Theurer.
He writes: “Democrats’ reaction reminds me of a hypochondriac: ‘What do you mean there’s nothing wrong? Do another blood test! Take another X-ray! There has to be something wrong with me!’
“Face it, it’s an emotional disorder.”