Richard Carranza has been New York City’s schools chancellor for five months now, long enough for a picture to emerge of a city official obsessed with ethnicity, yet indifferent to academic performance. Worse, he seems oblivious to the dangers embedded in racialized public-education policies—as does the man who hired him, Mayor Bill de Blasio.
Carranza made it clear before he arrived that his principal interest is ethnic equilibrium in the nation’s largest public school system, not achieving positive, across-the-board performance outcomes. The system has some bright spots—they’re moving center stage as the chancellor’s obsession with “integration” unfolds—but New York’s schools in general are a mess. As recently as two years ago, 420 of the city’s 525 high schools had prepared fewer than half of their graduates for college or a career.