Our Chancellor

If you were reading the newspapers this spring, you read a lot of horrible things about our chancellor, RIchard Carranza. It was a constant drumbeat. He hired friends. He demoted white women. He flip-flopped on math. He is responsible for schools doing poorly. He is anti-white. And there are teachers joining the chorus. Amazing, Joel Klein was never treated so harshly.

What’s going on? This is a reaction to Carranza’s proposals on diversity, and the introduction of implicit bias training. This is about race.

I didn’t love the implicit bias training, but it was ok. It certainly was not the horrible anti-white caricature portrayed on the blogs.

The diversity initiatives? Man, there are guys who teach “separate but equal is inherently unequal” about the South, but are cool with segregated schools up here. Not cool. Don’t like the Chancellor’s plans (and some of them aren’t the Chancellor’s)? Where’s yours?

Instead of attacking Brown v Board, the critics attack the chancellor’s mistakes – and many of them are real mistakes. But it’s in the context of going after him on race.

Let me end this note with something I put on a listserve this spring:

I have no interest in defending this Chancellor in general. However, there are two specific exceptions:

1. when Bloomberg supporters criticize him, especially for problems that were caused or exacerbated by Bloomberg/Klein – in those cases the critics need to be called out for hypocrisy, and I do call them out

2. Criticism of implicit bias training. This is strange place for me – I’m not a big fan of this training, but I recognize that the current public critique, clearly from the Post and more politely from others, is hostile to public education and even more so to integration, and I feel a strong need to differentiate myself from those critiques, especially when I criticize the chancellor..

The loudest critics of the chancellor today are those attacking implicit bias training. I do not stand with them. When I criticize him (as I have done over the last year for Regent’s grading policies, class size, keeping too many lawyers, poor communication with schools, empowering lousy principals, etc, etc) I make clear that I am not adding my voice to those who criticized him on race.