Richard A. Carranza is resigning as chancellor of New York City’s public school system.
The New York Times reports that the move comes after disagreements between Mayor Bill de Blasio and Carranza over school desegregation policy reached a breaking point in recent weeks.
Carranza, 54, is leaving about three years after he was appointed, and just 10 months before the end of de Blasio’s second and final term.
He will be replaced by Meisha Porter, a longtime city educator who now serves as Bronx superintendent.
Porter, 47, will become the first Black woman to lead the New York City district, which is the nation's largest public school system with over 1 million students and 1,800 schools. She will take over as chancellor on March 15.
Carranza’s announcement follows years of tension between the chancellor and the mayor involving who had the final say over major education decisions. The chancellor and other senior education officials sometimes felt that their expertise was overruled or disregarded by de Blasio, who runs the school district under mayoral control.
Carranza vowed from his first day as chancellor to tackle entrenched segregation in the city’s schools; the mayor has largely avoided even using the word.
It became clear that the mayor and chancellor had fundamentally different approaches to the problem, particularly when it came to selective admissions policies and gifted and talented programs.
The long-simmering issues came to a head earlier this month, during a conversation over the future of gifted and talented classes, according to several sources with direct knowledge of that conversation. Carranza drafted a resignation letter after that meeting, but did not immediately quit.
Carranza, who led the Houston school district during Hurricane Harvey and previously ran San Francisco’s public schools, was de Blasio’s second choice for the job. The first choice, Alberto M. Carvalho, the superintendent in Miami, turned down the job.
