“Houston’s loss is New York City’s gain,” said American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten and Houston Federation of Teachers President Zeph Capo in a joint statement. They were praising the hire of new New York City Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza. The city may have gained a new chancellor this week, but they took a major “L” the week before.
It seemed locked and sealed at the end of February. Last Wednesday evening, the mayor sent out a statement praising his new schools chancellor appointment, Miami-Dade County Schools Superintendent Alberto Carvalho.
De Blasio called Carvalho a world-class educator and said, “I am very confident that our extensive, national search has found New York City the best person to lead the nation’s largest school system into the future.”
The future barely lasted 16 hours.
In an emergency board meeting, Miami-Dade board members, students, teachers and former 2 Live Crew member and Miami rap legend Luther Campbell gave testimonials to Carvalho’s success and begged him to stay. He would grant them their wish.
“I underestimated the emotional tug, the level of commitment, the power that crying members of the community have had on me,” said Carvalho at the meeting. “Against my personal best interest, I shall remain in Miami-Dade as your superintendent.”
It’s not the first time that a city courting Carvalho was met with a “no” in some form. There were once rumors of a courtship between Carvalho and the Los Angeles Unified School District. In response, the Miami-Dade school board proceeded to open up the contract he was under at the time and give him a raise to stay.
United Federation of Teachers President Michael Mulgrew sent out a statement praising the hire of Carvalho, but when asked for a response to Carvalho backing out of the job offer, all Mulgrew could say was “next.”
“Next” turned out to be Carranza, the now former superintendent of Houston Independent School District. The UFT president likes this hire as well.
“Mr. Carranza has earned a reputation for collaboration with teachers, parents and school communities and has been a real champion of public schools,” said Mulgrew in an emailed statement. “We are encouraged by his commitment to all children, his resistance to a ‘testing culture’ and his support for the community schools approach.”
Carranza is set to take over for 74-year-old Carmen Fariña, who announced her retirement last December but said she’d remain in the position until the mayor found a replacement.
During a news conference announcing Carranza’s hire, the mayor—eager to move on from the Carvalho fiasco—stated Carranza’s bona fides.
“When he went on to Houston, he knew he was going into a very tough situation—a school district that had been historically underfunded and, I will say this gently, a state government that perhaps did not invest all it could have in education,” said de Blasio. “Richard went into a tough situation with that same equity agenda for Houston, and he was just getting into the work when the worst natural disaster in the history of Houston struck with Hurricane Harvey. When you look at Richard Carranza’s leadership in Houston during Hurricane Harvey, you see extraordinary strength and amazing ability to stay calm, despite the magnitude of the crisis. He is one of the people that helped get Houston back on its feet.”
Politico reported that Carvalho wouldn’t have been able to pick his own human resources director or chief of staff if he said yes to the gig. Did going from a king in Florida to a possible pawn in the five boroughs play a role in Carvalho reneging? Most will never know, but de Blasio wasn’t ready for any excuses after Carvalho’s announcement.
“Obviously whatever happened here is quite unusual but if he wasn’t interested in the job I don’t know why he flew up here several times and had incessant conversations about all the details and agreed to the release of the information publicly,” said de Blasio to reporters last week.
But Carranza is here and with that, he’ll jump feet first into the frying pan of education politics in the city. Look no further than the statement put out by a pro-charter school group.
“We welcome Richard Carranza as NYC Schools Chancellor and hope he will show himself to be an independent leader who critically reviews Mayor de Blasio’s education policies and charts a new course,” said StudentsFirstNY Executive Director Jenny Sedlis in a statement. “Carranza said he will ‘look under the hood,’ and when he does, he’ll see that Mayor de Blasio’s inattention to K-12 school improvement and the achievement gap, his hostility to school choice and his failed turnaround programs mean that a change is needed.”
So de Blasio has a new schools chancellor who will now be thrown into the battles over charter schools, closing schools, district woes, classroom space, funding and carrying on the mayor’s agenda. However, with the drama surrounding the hiring process in the first place, it’ll take some time for the mayor to live this down. As for the first choice for chancellor, Carvalho, he claimed to be “absolutely at peace with [his] decision” to stay in Miami.
“This is a community I love and one that has outperformed most urban school districts,” Carvalho said on Twitter. “We have great public education success stories, but you don’t hear about them enough.”
De Blasio’s Press Secretary Eric Phillips put the situation in a different light on the same social media platform.
“He was a Yes for a week+, until he was a No 15 minutes ago,” said Phillips on Twitter. “Bullet dodged.”