AP Photo New York City's next chancellor will be Houston schools chief Richard Carranza

New York City has a new schools chancellor. No, really.

Richard Carranza, who has led Houston’s public schools for the last 18 months and ran San Francisco’s schools for four years before that, will be the next leader of America's largest school system, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced Monday.


Carranza’s announcement comes just six days after de Blasio named Miami schools chief Alberto Carvalho as chancellor, and just five days after Carvalho turned down the job after a five-hour soap opera of a board meeting on live television. Though his name has not been floated by allies or in the press, it appears Carranza was a top contender for the job until it was offered to Carvalho.

Carranza shares many of Carvalho’s educational credentials and his biography aligns with the mayor’s requirements for what is seen as the most influential education job in America.

The grandson of immigrants from Mexico, Carranza spoke only Spanish when he started school in Arizona. He taught bilingual social studies — current chancellor Carmen Fariña’s favorite subject — and music in Tucson for a decade before becoming a regional superintendent in Las Vegas. After that, he climbed the ranks in San Francisco to lead that small but influential city school district and was hired for the top job in Houston in 2016. (He is also an accomplished mariachi musician.)

Much like Fariña, Carranza often touts his credentials as an educator.

“First and foremost, what you see is what you get. I'm a teacher,” Carranza said when he took the Houston schools chief job in August 2016.

Carranza is leaving Texas after a short stint in that state’s largest school district having just begun to roll out some of his agenda for Houston’s schools. He leaves behind a $200 million budget shortfall, the threat of his school board being taken over by the state, and a politically hostile state government for what will no doubt be an even more challenging but much more prestigious job at Tweed Courthouse.

Carranza currently earns $345,000 in Houston — about $8,000 less than Carvalho was offered in New York. Fariña currently makes a $235,000 salary but takes home over $400,000 including the pension she earned after 52 years in New York City’s schools. City officials did not immediately say what his new salary would be.

Carranza, who is 51, has not matched Carvalho’s national prominence, but he also lacks Carvalho's reputation as a politically ambitious operator. Carranza has previously been considered for the role of Los Angeles’ schools chief. And gained national attention for guiding Houston’s schools through Hurricane Harvey last summer, which he called the "most difficult time" of his career.

In the aftermath of the storm, Carranza distributed grants to district employees who lost their homes or belongings in the hurricane, managed the flow of students whose schools had been damaged to new sites, and arranged for all students to have three meals a day at school. Last week, Carranza presided over a meeting billed as" How Are We Doing, Houston?" to assess how students and staff were dealing with post-Harvey trauma in schools six months after the storm.

Houston is the nation’s seventh-largest school system with 290 schools and 216,000 students, a fraction of New York City’s 1.1 million students in 1,800 schools. But like New York, Houston has long struggled to properly educate its overwhelmingly poor and minority student body.

Just more than 62 percent of students in Houston’s schools are Latino, 24 percent are black, and just 9 percent are white. A vast majority of the city’s public school students — 77 percent — are poor. More students are passing Advanced Placement courses and fewer students are dropping out of high school in recent years, but student achievement remains variable.

The new chancellor and his new boss share an overlapping educational ideology.

As schools chief in San Francisco, Carranza focused on driving down suspensions, reducing them by 50 percent during his tenure, which included the biggest decrease in suspensions for black students in the city’s history. Suspensions in New York City schools have plummeted under de Blasio, who has eschewed strict discipline policies that have mostly affected black boys.

Graduation rates increased by 8 percent from Carranza’s first year as a deputy superintendent for instruction to his last year at the helm of San Francisco’s schools. Those gains were highest for vulnerable student populations that have historically struggled to graduate high school. De Blasio often boasts that the city’s graduation rate is higher than it has ever been at just over 80 percent, but wide achievement gaps persist.

Carranza has emphasized bilingual education, and used rhetoric about English language learners that is strikingly familiar to Fariña’s.

As the San Francisco superintendent, he said students learning English are “not a deficit that needs to be corrected, but a rich opportunity that needs to be developed and nurtured.” Fariña, who did not speak English when she started school, has put dual language and bilingual education at the center of her agenda.

The new chancellor also matches Fariña’s insistence that data-driven accountability not replace classroom visits and interactions with students.

“In school districts we don’t deal in widgets, we deal in souls,” Carranza told the Houston Press. Fariña has said her tenure showed the importance of “stories… not statistics.”

Carranza’s approach to urban school districts is rooted in the same ideology that de Blasio has put at the center of his own education agenda: equity.

“If we truly believe that public education is for the public, for all students, then we can’t treat students equally we have to treat them equitably,” Carranza said in an interview with HuffPost. And in a recent op-ed for the Houston Chronicle, Carranza said, “around HISD, our staff hears the word ‘equity’ in almost every conversation and decision-making process. It's what I believe in.”

As chancellor, Carranza will oversee America's most segregated school system, and will have to contend with a reality in which de Blasio generally refuses to use the word "segregation" to describe the state of the city's schools.

Carranza has also emphasized the need for equity in charter schools, the same stance de Blasio has adopted after the mayor realized early in his first term that he couldn’t afford to engage in political battle with the city’s powerful charter advocacy sector. In Houston, Carranza has not allowed low-performing schools to be taken over by charter networks. In an open letter to President Donald Trump, Carranza wrote, "while school choice is important, it has come at the expense of neighborhood schools — which are underfunded and often staffed with less experienced teachers — even though these schools are the heart of our educational system and serve our most disadvantaged students."

And, like Fariña, he says he has avoided using standardized test scores to determine a teacher’s rating. "We're not going to use student test scores against you because student test scores are not to fire teachers,” Carranza said a teacher rally last year.

But he has not adopted the kind of stridently anti-reform posture that de Blasio’s critics see in the mayor: He pushed for Teach for America teachers to fill vacancies in San Francisco’s schools before he was overruled by his board.

As chancellor in New York, Carranza will have to manage a controversy he did not create: the fate of dozens of struggling schools in the Renewal School program. He will have to manage the closure of about a dozen schools and work to improve nearly 50 others enough to have them graduate out of Renewal status by next year.

Carranza has indicated that he’s not against closing schools. He announced a hard-line approach for Houston’s worst schools just two months ago, slating 15 schools for closure or takeover. And last year, Carranza announced a separate $24 million plan for 32 of the city’s low-performing schools that sounds a great deal like the Renewal program: more professional development and instructional coaches for teachers and longer school days.

In New York City, Carranza will find a political climate much closer to what he was used to in San Francisco than what he found in Houston.

In Texas, he’s been pilloried by pastors and local politicians — and mocked by Breitbart — for his plan to add LGBT studies and ethnic studies to local curriculum. The Houston Chronicle reported that Carranza’s program could violate the Texas Health Code, which stipulates that “homosexuality is not a lifestyle acceptable to the general public."

Carranza has also had to plead with state education officials for more special education funding, even after an investigation by the Chronicle found that the state educational authority routinely denied services to the state’s students with disabilities.

"If there's anything we would say to the state of Texas, it's that you have to be able to invest in the services for students with disabilities,” Carranza said earlier this year.

In Carranza, de Blasio has found a new chancellor with extensive experience in urban school districts and a personal story likely to resonate with many of the city's most vulnerable families.

Now, the mayor will have to hope that the incoming leader of America's largest school system will be able to transform the city's schools as much as de Blasio hoped Carvalho would — just without the ego of the mayor's first choice.