Richard Carranza: ‘As the Chancellor, I Ultimately Own Everything’

NEW YORK — Richard A. Carranza became New York City’s school chancellor this month, charged with steering what is by far the country’s largest school system.

In the chancellor’s conference room on the ground floor of Tweed Courthouse, the ornate 19th century building next to City Hall that serves as the Education Department’s headquarters, Carranza sat down last week with The New York Times to discuss some of the most pressing challenges facing the city’s schools.

In a forthright conversation sprinkled with some educational jargon, he described his concerns about Mayor Bill de Blasio’s Renewal Schools program to improve badly struggling schools, which he said lacked a cohesive and widely understood strategic plan — a “theory of action,” as he called it. That initiative has cost nearly $600 million and yielded mixed results. He said he was open to creating a high-level position dedicated to addressing the needs of homeless students, who numbered more than 110,000 during the last school year. And while he suggested that he would consider bold action to tackle the city’s entrenched school segregation, something the de Blasio administration has been reluctant to do, he noted the state law that dictates admissions at a few of the city’s prestigious specialized high schools, where the number of black and Latino students is vanishingly small.

This interview has been condensed and edited.

A: Thank you!

I also have questioned how robust has our engagement with those communities been. So, more than just the school itself — the teachers and the people who work at the schools — do parents understand, No. 1, what the problem is or what the challenge is? But have they also understood, what are the consequences? After a number of years, if we don’t improve and you’re not part of this, you could face a situation where the schools will be truncated or there will be a different configuration, etc. Those are just some of the things in my conversations with the mayor, I’ve pushed really hard about. And what I’ve been really excited about is, he said: You know, you’re the chancellor, you have the expertise in education — so now what are you going to do about it?

A: Yeah, but I’ll tell you, we don’t have to call these schools anything. People in the community are already calling them schools that need improvement. So I think everywhere I’ve ever been, you have to pay attention to schools that historically have been underserved, and that are not performing academically where we want them to perform. You have to pay attention to that.

A: No. 1, I would ask the parent to go visit the school. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen parents — even in my short tours here in New York so far, but also in places I’ve worked before — where parents have an image or a perception of a school, and they’ve never gone to the school. They’ve never really met anybody at the school, but they’ve heard about the school. It’s important for you to actually go to the school.

That being said, it’s really important that we as a system are looking at schools where the educational opportunity is not what we would like. My personal, very personal belief system around schools, and how schools serve students, is that I’m not going to be satisfied if I wouldn’t be able to send my child to a particular school. If it’s not good enough for my child, it’s absolutely not good enough for anyone else’s.

A: I’m not sure about the title, but I do think that work has to live somewhere, and I think you do have to have somebody whose responsibility it is, in a large system like we are, to work on that every single day they’re at work. I do think that somebody needs to own it, somebody needs to champion it. Obviously, as the chancellor, I ultimately own everything, but I do think it’s an important role to have in the system.

A: Well, how far out on a limb did the Supreme Court go in 1954? Brown v. Board of Education. They were very clear. Schools cannot be segregated. Schools must be integrated. I think that diversifying and really keeping an eye toward diversifying our schools. Some folks would say it’s political, but I would say it’s actually the American way. That’s what we want in our public schools. Perhaps if we had more integration and more students that were able to learn about others that perhaps didn’t grow up the same as them, or aren’t from the same background as them, that we perhaps would see less social strife in the general population as people become adults. I think that’s part of educating the next generation, educating them for the diverse world that they’re going to enter.

A: I want students to be achieving at levels they’ve never achieved before. I want us to be talking about student achievement in more than just, how can I put this, more than just in one way of assessing student achievement — I don’t want it to just be based on test scores. I want us to be talking about how New Yorkers have really seen how students have much more diversity in what their experiences are in fine arts. I want New Yorkers to be talking about how much more diverse our schools are and how they actually reflect what the nation looks like. More than anything, I want New Yorkers to be proud of their public school system, and I think we do that by making sure that we’re engaging, that we’re delivering on the promises.