Can Richard Carranza Integrate the Most Segregated School System in the Country?
It was just a hair past 7 o’clock in the evening at Frederick Douglass Academy in Harlem, and Richard Carranza was a little late to the party. The cafeteria was bulging with parents, translators, and a handful of staff. The recently minted chancellor of the New York City public-school system had planned to arrive at 6 to talk to a handful of community activists in advance of a town-hall-style meeting. The topic at hand: diversity in the city’s public schools. Or, to put it more pointedly, desegregating them.
The racial makeup of the room was as varied as one might expect for a conversation about desegregation, particularly at such a tense moment in the city’s history. The movement to integrate New York City’s public schools had gotten new energy in recent months, but it was also met with fierce opposition. There have been viral videos of white parents angrily arguing that changing the schools will unfairly harm their children, politicians who backed reforms and then waffled after public pressure, and protests outside of the city’s Education Department punctuated by chants of “Save our schools.” In 2014, a study from the Civil Rights Project at the University of California, Los Angeles found that New York State has the most segregated public schools in the country, and that’s driven largely by New York City. Carranza, after just a few months on the job, has quickly positioned himself as the leading voice for integration—and he has his work cut out for him.
But on this humid Thursday in late June, Carranza was running behind. His meeting with the activists—which was scheduled to last roughly 30 minutes—was cut to five. He had to get to the main event—the diversity town hall. But even considering the disorganization, there was no sign of hurried concern as Carranza, 51 years old with jet-black, slicked-back hair, strode in through the back of the cafeteria. He has a giant personality packed into a 5-foot-8-inch frame, and was draped in what he calls his urban school-chancellor’s uniform—a pinstripe suit, neatly pressed shirt, a cornflower-blue tie, and pocket square to match.
“Good evening, everybody!” Carranza said after being introduced. His booming voice—cultivated from decades spent singing and playing in a mariachi band—filled the room. The crowd responded in kind. “Buenas noches,” he added.
Carranza doesn’t spend a lot of time reviewing what he’s going to say at events like these. He tends not to pre-write his speeches, he says, and keeps it simple. He opens by emphasizing the importance of talking about desegregating schools—not only because it’s a conversation he wants to have, but because kids in the classrooms are talking about it. People in the community are talking about it, as well. But with something as complex as dismantling a system of segregation, you could wear out your vocal chords before anything fundamentally changes—and people in New York City, which has one of the most segregated school systems in the country, have been talking about it for a long time.
“Sixty-four years ago, the question of diversifying schools—” Carranza caught himself. He considers diversifying to be weak language.
“—integrating schools,”.” The court said separate is never equal, especially in education, he told the audience—which applauded. But 64 years later, the city, and the country, have little to show for it, Carranza said. And nationally, the United States is resegregating, doubling between 1996 and 2016.
