This piece is oddly timed at best. As Ms. Shapiro knows, we are all awaiting the release of the second and more significant set of recommendations from the School Diversity Advisory Group (could be any day now). This group had been at work for almost a year when the chancellor arrived, and it would have been strange indeed for him to move forward with sweeping changes on his own without waiting to see its findings. The chancellor will have more than an opportunity and then some to show his mettle in the next few months.
Perhaps more importantly Ms. Shapiro is just wrong here (and in previous pieces) in saying that the District 15 plan was “created by parents and local politicians before Mr. Carranza arrived.” The plan was created through a superb planning process funded and supported by the DOE and could easily have been derailed by the DOE. DOE officials introduced every workshop and made massive amounts of data available. Moreover, the planning process was nowhere near complete when Mr. Carranza arrived. A different chancellor might have softened the content of the final report and might not have been able (or more likely, wouldn’t have tried) to convince the mayor to adopt the bold recommendations of the plan. The fact that parents and community members were involved in crafting a plan is a strength – not a weakness.
One doesn’t have to look back far in our posts to see that we are frequent critics of the DOE under Chancellor Carranza, but good advocacy starts with a proper analysis of the landscape, and this isn’t that.
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