ANALYSIS: New NYC schools chancellor wants dramatic – even joyful — departure from Bloomberg era
In a city where politicians and some educators are obsessed with raising test scores, New York City’s new schools chancellor Carmen Fariña stood beside her new boss this week and used a word rarely mentioned in the heated rhetoric of reform: Joy.
Joy?!
Carmen Farina, left, spoke at Brooklyn’s P.S. 15 earlier this month. Now, she is expected to be named chancellor under Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio. (Photo: Sarah Darville/Gotham Schools)
“Joy has been really been missing in the last few years,” the veteran educator said during a carefully orchestrated announcement of her appointment at the sprawling Brooklyn middle school where newly elected Democratic Mayor Bill de Blasio sent his own children, a school she oversaw as a District 15 superintendent.
Here was a brand new tone, one that Charles Dickens’ notorious headmaster Thomas Gradgrind – he of “nothing but facts,’’ in the novel “Hard Times,’’ would most surely disapprove, even as cheers erupted throughout the city, sprinkled with a healthy dose of skepticism.
“It is a new day in New York City,’’ proclaimed education historian Diane Ravitch in her blog. “The era of punishing, blaming, and shaming professional educators is over.”
De blasio said he chose Fariña to lead the nation’s largest school system over other candidates he had considered from across the U.S. because they agree on education issues – and because of her lengthy experience.
“Literally no one knows our school system better,’’ he said of Fariña, the first city chancellor since 1995 with actual education credentials.
Fariña pledged to