Carranza’s parting shot

I’ve been sitting with this for a couple of days, and ultimately decided it was not worth much more than a shrug.

Former Houston ISD superintendent Richard Carranza did not mince words in an interview published this week about his disappointment in HISD’s failure to pass major reforms he championed during his 18-month tenure, suggesting the district lacked the appetite for changes that would boost outcomes for lower-income and minority students.

“As soon as I left, it seemed like people just didn’t have the stomach to take the fight,” Carranza, who left to become chancellor of New York City public schools in April, said in an article published by The Atlantic.

In a couple of parting shots four months after leaving from Houston, Carranza told the news magazine that HISD leaders have resisted changes that would benefit historically underserved students, creating inequitable access to quality education among students from all backgrounds. His comments cut to key questions about the district’s dedication to impoverished and minority students, while also raising the specter that Carranza’s abrupt departure contributed to the proposals stalling.

In The Atlantic article, which largely focused on his immediate reform efforts in New York City, the 51-year-old lamented HISD’s current campus funding model and the geographic layout of its magnet schools, which he said have favored students from more affluent and white backgrounds. In the months before his departure, Carranza proposed shifting toward a more centralized funding model that largely would benefit schools in lower-income and predominantly black and Hispanic neighborhoods.

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“Carranza didn’t leave any definite plans on the table. Only ideals,” HISD Board President Rhonda Skillern-Jones said. “For me, there were conceptual changes that were never fully vetted or fleshed out by the administration.”

The district also was dealing with a large budget deficit and contentious plans to surrender control over 10 chronically low-performing schools, prompting a few trustees to question whether HISD was tackling too much at one time.

Interim Superintendent Grenita Lathan ultimately shelved the plan a month after Carranza announced his move to New York, pledging a committee to study the district’s resource allocation methods. That committee is scheduled to meet in private for the first time on Aug. 7, with recommendations provided to HISD administrators by December. Forty members have been invited, though not all have committed to date, HISD officials said.

HISD trustees largely have agreed the district’s magnet school system needs reform, but they have been unable to agree on the extent of needed changes. Various community factions also have been divided on whether to tweak the system, including a vocal grass-roots group that lobbied against Carranza’s proposal this year.

Carranza’s proposals, which as Skillern-Jones rightly notes were more big picture ideals than detailed plans, did run into resistance, but then all big changes do. You need to put in a lot of effort and resources to show what will happen and why it will be better and what the short-term costs will be and just generally educate, engage, and get buy-in from an array of stakeholders who will be directly affected and may have concerns about things you hadn’t thought of. It’s certainly possible that the resistance will be too fierce to fully overcome and that what ends up getting implemented is a series of patches and compromises and watered-down versions of your original vision, but that’s the way it goes sometimes. I’d be more inclined to take Carranza’s complaints seriously if he’d been in town longer than five minutes and had done some of the real work that was and still is going to be needed to make such big changes.

Related Posts:

• Where HISD stands today
• It looks like we’re getting a new school board
• Superintendent search will continue