Richard Carranza is NYC’s most overpaid nonessential worker
Americans raised generations of children to believe one thing above all else: If you work hard, you can achieve anything you set your mind to. But if New York City Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza had his way, that familiar motto would read more like this: If you work, that’ll do.
That’s the impression the schools chief gives to students, parents and educators through his anti-meritocratic policies that would label students’ performance as either “satisfactory” or “needs improvement,” rather than encourage and reward excellence. It’s even more apparent when he uses a “good crisis,” as he recently put it, as a proving ground for his misguided “reforms.”
Carranza, the highest paid nonessential worker in Gotham at $363,000 a year, has been working remotely since schools closed on March 16. I was struck by his unrelenting arrogance in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. That arrogance was on clear display during the most recent Panel for Educational Policy, or PEP, meeting on May 7.
I expressed my concerns with his brainstorm to eliminate letter grades for K-8 remote learning. I also took issue with the insensitivity of his comment to “never let a good crisis go to waste.” In response, Nonessential No. 1 launched into a personal attack that accused me of playing politics and ended in him telling me to “get on board” with his agenda.
But this was far from the first time he has shown his inability to handle criticism.
Carranza previously spat back at other elected officials who questioned his policies. Recall when US Rep. Grace Meng and state Sen. John Liu criticized him for alienating the Asian-American community with his schemes to eliminate screening for high-achieving schools — and insinuating that Asian-American students “own admissions” to these schools. With his notorious his-way-or-the-highway attitude, Carranza accused these officials of playing politics, too.
The man doesn’t play well with others. His inability to handle criticism or contrary ideas from the board led to his sudden departure as superintendent of the Houston Independent School District after just 18 months on the job. Naturally, he accused the HISD board members of harboring political animus, too.
That’s why Carranza immediately sought to surround himself with like-minded people when he came to the Big Apple. The PEP meetings have become a rubber-stamp scenario, in which the panelists applaud his efforts with little debate. And no wonder: Mayor Bill de Blasio appoints eight of the 13 members of the PEP.
Under the hard-left de Blasio-Carranza regime, PEP members are a Mutual Admiration Society that pays no mind to members of the public who disagree with the agenda, such as a middle-school student who spoke about the proposed pass-fail policy during the May 7 meeting.
“When you give the same grade to someone who spent the whole week working on something and someone who played video games until the last minute,” the student thoughtfully said, “you are devaluing the first person’s work.”
Parents and students have repeatedly complained to my office about the distance-learning system in general. Money was wasted on iPads for students when cheaper laptops would be a more effective tool. Teachers were trained to use Zoom for their classes, then were suddenly told they could no longer use Zoom, only to go back to using Zoom weeks later.
The proposed grading policy for remote learning was the last straw for many parents and students, who worry that it would destroy their chances of getting into top-performing high schools. I was shot down and disrespected when representing those concerns to the chancellor, and he shot down those parents and students, as well. He claims he used feedback from parents and students in coming up with the policy but can’t explain where exactly that feedback came from — or whether or not he ever listened to the other side of the argument.
This lefty approach will only breed mediocrity. It discourages excellence while telling students that barely meeting standards is good enough. That is the opposite of the American Idea.
Carranza needs to learn to embrace debate, bring in opposing opinions, find a middle ground and craft a policy that works for all students. His thin-skinned, out-of-towner defiance doesn’t fly in New York.
City Councilman Robert Holden represents District 30 in Queens.
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