Teacher Deyshia Hargrave is a National Heroine After She is Arrested For Asking Why the Superintendent Got a Raise

In Louisiana and the world, teacher Deyshia Hargrave is a heroine. She bravely stood up at the school board meeting for her district and asked Superintendent Jerome Puyau why he got a raise while she and other teachers had not seen a pay increase in a decade.

Kudos to you, Ms. Hargrave!!!!

Betsy Combier

betsy@advocatz.com

Editor, Advocatz

Editor, NYC Rubber Room Reporter

Editor, Parentadvocates.org
Editor, New York Court Corruption
Editor, National Public Voice
Editor, NYC Public Voice
Editor, Inside 3020-a Teacher Trials

Deyshia Hargrave

Louisiana Teacher Deyshia Hargrave Speaks Out for the First Time Since Being Handcuffed Monday; School Chief Takes Part of the Blame

T74, By LAURA FAY | January 11, 2018

The teacher who garnered national attention for her dramatic arrest outside a school board meeting in Louisiana Monday has spoken out for the first time since the incident, saying she was “appalled” at her treatment and refuses to be “silenced.”

Credit: NBC TODAY

Deyshia Hargrave, a middle school English language arts teacher at Rene A. Rost Middle School in Kaplan, Louisiana, first talked about the incident in a video shared on the Facebook page of the state teachers union, the Louisiana Association of Educators, emphasizing the free speech rights of teachers. The union also released a statement in support of Hargrave.

“I’m appalled at this, and you should be too,” she said.

Hargrave spoke with the Today show Thursday morning, as did Jerome Puyau, the district superintendent whose pay raise was the source of Hargrave’s protest.

“I don’t support our people getting arrested. I do not,” the superintendent said. “However, a person has to follow the rules.”

But Puyau defended his raise. He told KATC that it was his first pay increase in his five years, and that the district has experienced significant improvement under his watch.

“You can always use more money in the classroom,” he told NBC. “But when is a good time for the superintendent to get a raise?”

The incident at the meeting began when Hargrave questioned the superintendent and the school board about a performance-based raise of about $30,000 for Puyau. A city marshal asked Hargrave to leave the meeting after she was ruled “out of order” and then arrested her in a dramatic confrontation in the hallway for “remaining after being forbidden” and resisting an officer. News cameras captured the whole thing, and videos quickly went viral and sparked an outpouring of support for Hargrave.

The superintendent’s new contract will increase his salary from $110,130 to $140,811, KATC reported. The board voted 5–3 Monday to approve the new contract. The average teacher salary in the district is $47,522. Teachers in Vermilion Parish haven’t had a salary increase in almost 10 years.

Puyau said his staff and family have received death threats and obscene messages since the meeting. He told NBC that many of his relatives are educators and “it is not fair” that they are being hurt by the negative publicity.

In an interview with CBS, Puyau, who was at the meeting, took the blame for the backlash over Hargrave’s treatment, saying he should have stood up for the teacher’s right to speak.

Puyau did not respond to The 74’s requests for comment.

The city attorney and prosecutor have said Hargrave will not face charges in the case. The school board has indicated it does not wish to press charges either.

School board president Anthony Fontana said in a radio interview that the teacher needed to be escorted out because she was not following meeting rules and that the officer who arrested her was just doing his job.

“This is not about the board, it’s about the teacher, and everybody wants to side on the poor little woman who got thrown out,” he said. “Well, she made a choice. She could have walked out and nothing would have happened.”

Fontana’s law office said Thursday he would not answer questions about the incident.

KATC reported that the officer in question, who is a city marshal and serves as a school resource officer in the parish, was previously accused of using excessive force on the job. Shortly after a 2011 incident that involved accusations that he and another officer slammed a man into a building and against a slab of concrete, he was terminated from the Scott Police Department. The lawsuit was settled in 2016.

Superintendent challenged over pay raise says he "should have stood up" for teacher

CBS News

A Louisiana school superintendent is speaking out about the controversial arrest of one of his teachers. Deyshia Hargrave was taken into custody Monday after questioning the superintendent's pay raise at a board meeting. The former teacher of the year was arrested, but will not be prosecuted.

• Handcuffed teacher in Louisiana says lawsuit likely

Vermilion Parish Superintendent Jerome Puyau told CBS News' David Begnaud there are things he wishes he did differently at Monday night's board meeting. He vows the district will learn from this incident, but says the backlash has taken a toll on him and his family.

"I hated what happened," Puyau said.

The superintendent said he and his staff have been receiving threats ever since Hargrave's arrest.

"Twenty-eight years of my life is dedicated to the students of this community it's so hard to see this negative. It's tough," he said.

The turmoil began at a school board meeting Monday night, when Hargrave questioned why the superintendent was slated to get a roughly $30,000 raise.

"At the top – that's not where kids learn. It's in the classrooms," Hargrave said during the meeting.

The board president ruled Hargrave out of order after she tried to speak for a second time. A deputy city marshal told her to leave and she complied. Then she was forcibly arrested outside in the hall.

Hargrave released a video Wednesday saying she hopes people aren't afraid to speak out after seeing what happened to her.

Puyau's new contract bumps his yearly salary from $110,000 to roughly $140,000 – still less than average for superintendents in Louisiana. Teachers in the district also make less than the state average, and they haven't had a raise in a decade.

"Within the next few months we're going to be bringing to the board a plan where we can bring a raise," Puyau said.

While emotional over the backlash, Puyau says he doesn't blame the deputy marshal who arrested Hargrave.

"I'm the superintendent, I'm to blame," he said. "I should have stood up, okay? That's what you want to hear and it's the truth, I should have stood up ... Let her speak.

Puyau said no one on the board directed the city marshal to escort Hargrave out. The marshal was contracted to work security at the meeting, but Puyau said they don't plan on having him again. He also noted the deputy is a well-liked school resource officer at one of the district middle schools, and does not plan on firing him. CBS News has reached out to the marshal but has not heard back.

© 2018 CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved.

KATC TV3

✔@KATCTV3

"I'm the superintendent, I'm to blame. I should have stood up, okay? That's what you

want to hear and it's the truth, I should have stood her speak." - Jerome Puyau says following the arrest of Deyshia Hargrave in Abbeville http://www.katc.com/story/37245861/superintendent-puyau-says-he-should-have-stood-up-and-stepped-in-during-mondays-board-meeting …

1:09 PM - Jan 11, 2018

Superintendent Puyau says he should have stood up and stepped in during Monday's board meeting

New today: Vermilion Parish Superintendent Jerome Puyau told CBS News there are things he wishes he did differently at Monday night's board meeting.   

katc.com

The NYC Department of Education Failed To Place ATRs as Planned

Aixa Rodriguez

The New York City Department of Education is an institution trying to move forward without a strategy or the necessary information to reach set goals successfully. And, no one wants to admit this fact.

As the City School Board - the Panel For Educational Policy - remains under Mayoral control (in my opinion a total mistake), the buck stops at Mayor de Blasio.

The political environment of NYC is structured in such a way as to assure incumbents their jobs until they die, or reach term limits, at which point their best friend is "voted" in. We continue to have a pay-to-play state. De Blasio's extensive payola machine in this state guaranteed him a second term as Mayor, despite a first term that looked like he was bought by rich "I-want-somethings" who were willing to pay to get what they wanted.

One of the biggest problems that I see in the Department of Education is that huge amounts of public dollars are placed on well-funded but unworkable, bad ideas of someone who has caught the mayor's ear for some unknown reason. But no one has to care if the idea works or not, because there is employment immunity (I do not mean tenure, I mean political protection) and the dollars don't come from any individual pocket. Many people are very careless with money that comes from the public tub... see below.

The UFT doesn't seem to be interested in changing the Absent Teacher Reserve (ATR) situation, an embarrassment for sure. How unfair to displace professional people and make them roam from school to school to teach subjects they were not trained to teach? How disrespectful is that?

No one who can do something about this situation actually cares enough to make changes. Sad.

Betsy Combier

betsy@advocatz.com

Editor, Advocatz

Editor, NYC Rubber Room Reporter

Editor, Parentadvocates.org
Editor, New York Court Corruption
Editor, National Public Voice
Editor, NYC Public Voice
Editor, Inside 3020-a Teacher Trials

Karen Sklaire

ATR Teachers: Pool’s Stigma Shaped Meager Results: 41 Back in Class

• By CRYSTAL LEWIS, The Chief,
 
• Dec 29, 2017 Updated Jan 3, 2018

After much controversy, the Department of Education’s plan to place 400 Teachers from the Absent Teacher Reserve into schools was a bust, with just 41 Teachers placed in schools that had vacancies.

But that was no surprise to Aixa Rodriguez, Gina Trent and Karen Sklaire, three of the Teachers in the pool.

                                                   Blaming the Blameless?

In October, this newspaper reported that some Teachers in the ATR feared the stigma of being in the pool would make Principals reluctant to hire them. In that article, Ms. Rodriguez said she’d heard that some Principals were hiding vacancies; she said recently she believes that was one reason why the number of Teachers matched to schools was so low.

“They blame us for being in this position. There’s no way to absorb us,” Ms. Rod­ri­guez said in a phone interview.

Ms. Trent said that because ATR Teachers have been vilified for years, “I knew they would have trouble placing us.”

There were 1,202 teachers in the ATR pool on the first day of school this year. As part of a goal to reduce the cadre, the DOE said it would begin matching ATR Teachers to vacancies that were still open by Oct. 15.

The plan immediately met pushback by pro-charter-school groups, including StudentsFirstNY, which rallied worried parents at City Hall. Even though the majority of Teachers ended up in the pool because their schools closed or had drops in enrollment, some parents and education advocates were concerned about the quality of candidates. About a third of the pool’s Teachers have gone through a disciplinary case; 12 percent received unsatisfactory ratings.

Barred From ‘Renewals’

Days before the agency began looking at the vacancies, Schools Chancellor Carmen Fariña announced that Teach­ers from the reserve pool would not be placed in the city’s Renewal program for struggling schools.

But the DOE found a lower number of vacancies than anticipated, partly because a few of the vacancies were temporary and enrollment decreased at some schools, which meant they didn’t need more Teachers.

“I think a lot of schools hired as quickly as they could so they wouldn’t have to take in an ATR Teacher,” said Ms. Sklaire. The Drama Teacher was excessed in June after her school’s enrollment declined.

One hundred and thirteen Teachers from the pool were hired prior to Oct. 15. An additional 205 Teachers were provisionally placed on a quarterly basis, and can be hired permanently if they receive an Effective rating or higher during evaluations.

“We’ll continue working with our school leaders and ATR Teachers to supervise and support ATR Teachers, and we’ll address any matches that aren’t working for schools,” said Randy Asher, who was hired to shrink the reserve.

Thrown in Cold

Ms. Rodriguez, an ESL Teacher, was placed at a Bronx high school until the semester’s end in January. She said that another Teach­er had been teaching her class for the first weeks of school.

“I was given no curriculum or guide and had no idea what the class had been doing,” she said. Because she missed out on developing relationships with students and staff at the beginning of the school year, she said, she felt “a mixture of guilt and frustration” that the semester was ending.

Ms. Trent, an English Teacher who has been in the pool for 10 years, said she was also provisionally placed until January but wasn’t given a class. “We are supposed to be used to assist other Teachers but that’s not happening here,” she said, adding that she and another ATR Teacher often work in the library.

Because the DOE announced that the placements would be until June, Ms. Trent was surprised to find out hers would end so soon. That experience isn’t new: she said that many ATR Teachers, who earn an average salary of $94,000, had been told they’d be hired permanently but weren’t because the DOE wouldn’t subsidize their salaries after the first year.

“So many of us have been lied to,” she said.

In addition to frustrations over the DOE’s failure to place as many ATR Teachers as anticipated, there are also concerns about how the closing of 14 schools, including nine Renewal schools, would expand the pool. More than 400 Teachers will be affected.

“It’s going to increase the pool. We’re just creating more ATRs,” Ms. Sklaire said.

About 70 percent of Teachers ended up in the pool because of a budget reduction or declining student enrollment, or because of a school closing or phase-out, like Ms. Rodriguez.

Her former school, Foreign Language Academy of Global Studies, faced a sharp drop in enrollment and joined the Renewal program for the 2015-2016 school year. She became an ATR when her school closed in 2016.

New schools will open in place of some of those set to close, and at least half of the positions in them are supposed to go to Teachers from the closed schools, according to the United Federation of Teachers.

But at a Dec. 18 press conference, Ms. Fariña had said that there have been cases where that hasn’t been true: at I.S. 584, which replaced a shuttered middle school this fall, “nowhere near” half of the Teachers came from the previous school. The majority of Teachers who were put in the reserve after their schools closed in the 2016-2017 school year have been placed, according to the DOE.

Do Better Next Year?

“We’re confident that we’ll be able help Teachers at closing schools secure new positions for next year,” said agency spokesperson Mi­chael Aciman.

But to Ms. Rodriguez, that means Teachers already in the pool will have more competition to be hired at a school. “It’s not good for me, it’s not good for Teachers coming from the closing schools, and it’s not good for schools that could have good Teachers,” she said.

At 3020-a, The Defense Must Be That Inactive Students are Engaged

Teachers in New York City are being brought up on charges because their students are not yelling out answers, raising their hands, and therefore are not "engaged" according to the very misunderstood and very mis-used standards in the Danielson rubric.

Susan Cain, author of Quiet: the Power of Introverts in a World that Can't Stop Talking.

We at Advocatz argue, when defending a teacher's pedagogy at 3020-a, that a silent student can still be learning. The DOE attorneys fight this, and say that only those students who are visibly active - talking, raising their hands, writing notes, etc., - are "engaged". Ridiculous.

If you follow this blog, you may have already read my opinion about the Danielson rubric:

Prohibit The Department of Education Lawyers From Using The Danielson Rubric For Observation Reports and 3020-a Arbitration

and,

Danielson Cannot Be Used in Evaluation Decisions

My Life As a NYC Teacher: Chap. 84: ODD OD

Below, see an article about Quiet Revolution. Use this in your rebuttals! (EVERY observation/letter to file MUST be rebutted!)

Betsy Combier

betsy@advocatz.com

Editor, Advocatz

Editor, NYC Rubber Room Reporter

Editor, Parentadvocates.org
Editor, New York Court Corruption
Editor, National Public Voice
Editor, NYC Public Voice
Editor, Inside 3020-a Teacher Trials

Teaching Introverted Students: How a 'Quiet Revolution' Is Changing Classroom Practice

By Brenda Iasevoli

At the end of each lesson, when 2nd grade teacher Erin Pawlak asked her students at P.S. 11 in New York City to reflect on their reading or share a successful strategy, the same hands would shoot up.

“Ideas came quick to these students so they were always doing the talking,” said Pawlak.

But what about the quiet students? Pawlak and fellow teacher Dawn Rosevear set out to answer that question at a teacher training conference in their city that was given by a group called Quiet Revolution in June of 2016. The aim of the two-week Quiet Summer Institute was to coach teachers on how to develop leadership qualities in introverted students—presumably, the students who were not raising their hand in Pawlak’s class.

The suspicion that they may be holding quiet and otherwise bright students to an unfair standard is driving some teachers to change their conception of class participation, which can count for up to half of a student’s overall grade in some classrooms and shape the teacher’s perception of student success. For Pawlak and Rosevear, the emphasis on teaching to personality types promoted by the New York City-based Quiet Revolution seemed like a way of clearing away some longstanding notions that were getting in the way of acknowledging, and rewarding, their quiet students’ unique contributions. Quiet Revolution is the brainchild of writer Susan Cain, whose 2012 book, Quiet: the Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking, became a bestseller, and whose talk on making the workplace more inclusive of different personality styles became a TED Talk phenomenon. Since then, Cain has set her sights on changing the classroom, where she says teachers unconsciously reward the extroverts who dive headfirst into discussions, sometimes without much forethought.

Becoming ‘Quiet Ambassadors’

Over the course of the paid workshops that summer, Pawlak and Rosevear, along with 61 other like-minded teachers from the 19 network schools across the country, learned how to change the format of class discussion and group work in order to help the introverts—and even the extroverts—to succeed. The two became what the organization calls “Quiet Ambassadors.” Upon returning to their school, the teachers set to work training their teaching colleagues on how to measure students’ engagement, as opposed to their participation.

One of their first orders of business was to redesign the rubric that P.S. 11 teachers were using to grade class participation. Pawlak and Rosevear made one notable change: They removed hand-raising as an indicator of student engagement. “It’s archaic to think that kids are going to constantly raise their hands, and that’s how we know they’re engaged,” Rosevear said. “In our training of teachers we shared examples of traditional comments, like ‘so and so is really great, but he needs to raise his hand more.’ These are things we’ve all said, but when we hear them now we have these cringe-worthy moments where it’s like ‘I can’t believe I said that to a child.’ ”

Pawlak and Rosevear’s guide, which now bears the trademark of Quiet Revolution and is available to educators in the network, suggests comments aimed at shifting teachers’ views of quiet kids, like “while Chloe doesn’t always offer answers to questions in class, I can see that she is engaged and understanding concepts through her body language and written responses.”

The tricky part is how to evaluate body language and determine that a student is listening intently. Teachers should look for eye contact, “facial feedback,” and movements like leaning forward toward the speaker, said Rosevear. But it’s also telling to simply look at the projects that students complete.

“If you are engaged in the lesson, then the product you create is going to show that you’re putting thought and effort into your work every day,” Pawlak added.

Class Participation Reconsidered

For Heidi Kasevich, the director of education at Quiet Revolution, rethinking participation is key to the success of introverts. She said some of the schools in the organization’s network set class participation at 50 percent of a student’s grade. Kasevich, who taught history in middle and high school classrooms in New York City for 25 years, said she has seen school cultures that were one-size-fits-all, geared more for the extroverts than for the introverts.

“It’s important to open up lots of different avenues to participation,” Kasevich said. “We need to shift our thinking from class participation is 20, 30 or 50 percent of your grade to ‘here are a lot of different ways that students can be engaged in your class,’ from body language to short written check-ins to electronic communication, to quietize the thinking process”—or, in other words, create an introvert-friendly learning environment.

In the year after the Quiet Summer Institute, Pawlak and Rosevear, along with other P.S. 11 teachers, tested out the strategies with their students. First, the teachers gave students a personality survey that Pawlak and Rosevear designed, borrowing from a survey that Quiet Revolution designed for older students and translating the text into pictures. Students could choose, for instance, between a picture of a kid at a desk by himself and a kid sitting at a table with other students. Their choices revealed their preferences for working alone or in groups.

Once teachers had a sense of whether students were introverts, extroverts, or a combination, they each chose two students they identified as introverts to track their engagement during different activities throughout the school year using a scale ranging from highest (talking to the whole class and critiquing) to lowest (no engagement, not talking, no eye contact).

‘Think-Pair-Share’

Students shouldn’t always have to show what they know out loud, according to Pawlak. That’s a crucial shift in the way teachers think about class participation. Why shouldn’t students be able to respond to discussion or debate questions in writing? At the very least, they should be able to write down their thoughts and discuss their ideas with another student before entering a whole-class discussion, Pawlak added. This strategy, called “think–pair–share,” is highly touted by Quiet Revolution. And Pawlak said her students give her daily proof that it works.

Kathy Schultz, the dean of the education school at the University of Colorado and the author of Rethinking Classroom Participation: Listening to Silent Voices, said the emphasis on giving students extra time to think before articulating their ideas in a whole-class setting is just good all-around teaching. But she’s skeptical of the organization’s emphasis on personality. Schultz thinks teachers should be able to recognize the ways quiet students think and participate, and she’s not just talking about head nodding or eye contact.

“This is about more than just teaching kids the cues that are going to make them successful in a white, middle-class classroom,” she said. “There are cultures where listening is more important than talking. We have to get to know who students are.”

Schultz suggests teachers learn to “listen to the silence.” Students are quiet for a whole range of reasons, she said, and labeling them introverts just ends up hindering them in the end. “They may just be thoughtful in a different kind of way,” she said. Schultz’s own daughter was graded poorly in class participation, but it turned out she didn’t feel the need to speak when another student already voiced a similar idea that she had brewing in her own head. “She felt that she didn’t have a unique perspective to add to the discussion,” Schultz said. “That’s valuable. If she’s aiming for a unique perspective then it wouldn’t be productive to push her to talk more.”

For her part, Pawlak sees her role as helping students to explore their preferences for the way they best learn, and the changes she made in her classroom helped move students from the lowest engagement end of the scale to the highest. One 2nd grader in particular never seemed to be paying attention. More often than not, he would be gazing out the window. The survey helped Pawlak identify him as introverted. From then on, instead of jumping right into a class discussion she allowed students time to be with their own thoughts. They could write or draw to develop their ideas, then share their thoughts with one other student, and finally test their ideas out with the entire class.

“Anytime he was able to voice his opinion in writing he thrived,” Pawlak said. “By the end of the year, he was a completely different student, taking a leadership role in group activities, even presenting the group’s work to the class. He began participating in group discussions, saying ‘I agree with you’ or ‘I disagree.’ ”

The student became a model of class participation, just by having a chance to process his ideas in his journal before he spoke. Said Pawlak, “That seemed to make all the difference for him.”

Studies Illustrate Plight of Introverted Students

Demitri Lynch, a kindergartner at City Neighbors Hamilton Charter School in Baltimore, plays by himself in his classroom. The school is designed to be "introvert friendly" so that students have spaces to work alone or in groups on the school's project-based curriculum.

—Matt Roth for Education Week

 Introverts and Extraverts Require Different Learning Environments

Managing the College Classroom: Perspectives from an Introvert and an Extrovert

Carmen Farina, NYC Chancellor, is Retiring- For The Third Time

Carmen Farina

NYC's "favorite" grandmother, a person who I've seen shred another person so quickly if you blink it's already done, is "retiring" again, for the third time. 

She is a backstabber who despises unionized teachers, and parents who do not stand in line to do whatever she wants. And yes, I know from personal experience working with her for two years as a parent and she was Principal of PS 6.

PLEASE, whoever follows Bill de Blasio as Mayor, don't bring Carmen back! New York City does not need another "children last" person.

The NY POST Editorial Board (see article below) says it right:

"It’ll be tough to find someone who will be as diligently indifferent to a disgraceful status

 quo."

Exclusive: The Winds May Be Shifting at NYC Schools, as Mayor Isn’t Considering Carmen Fariña’s List of Internal Candidates to Replace Her as Chancellor (THE 74 , December 20, 2017)

Carmen Farina: The Problem With Her Being Chancellor of the NYC School System Is.......

(May 27, 2014)

Despite Too Many Questions of Improprieties, Carmen Farina is Named Deputy Chancellor For the New York City DOE

A Question For Carmen Farina, NYC Chancellor: Where is the Money?

The Case Against Carmen Farina, Former Bloomberg/Diana Lam Partner in Crime

Carmen Farina and the Coverup of Her Misconduct in Special Education Allocations to NYC's Neediest Students

I think this quote is accurate:

Betsy Combier

betsy@advocatz.com

Editor, Advocatz

Editor, NYC Rubber Room Reporter

Editor, Parentadvocates.org
Editor, New York Court Corruption
Editor, National Public Voice
Editor, NYC Public Voice
Editor, Inside 3020-a Teacher Trials

Fariña’s big achievement: embracing a disgraceful status quo

By Post Editorial Board

December 21, 2017 | 6:57pm

Carmen Farina and Bill de Blasio

 Say this for Schools Chancellor Carmen Fariña, who’s just announced she’s quitting by the end of the school year: Mayor de Blasio hired her to not shake up the system, and she delivered.

Fariña, who spent her adult life working in the system, knew all the reasons why the schools “couldn’t” do better, and regularly lectured on how it’s inevitable that any system so huge, facing so many challenges, has its lemons.

The signature effort of her term, de Blasio’s Renewal program, was a half-billion-dollar exercise in seeking marginal improvement from failed schools, rather than simply shutting them down and opening new ones in their place.

She managed to set expectations low enough that just 21 of the original 94 schools “graduated” out of the program — even as plummeting enrollment and other woes forced her to close another 27 after all.

Ever a team player, she embraced the watering-down of the school-discipline code and the convenient revision of surveys that might otherwise reveal the negative impact on school safety. The first student in over a generation to die in a city school was stabbed to death on her watch.

As a principal, Fariña had refused to hire teachers from the Absent Teacher Reserve pool. As chancellor, she assented to de Blasio’s plan to foist these “educators” on schools that don’t want them, especially struggling ones.

And she oversaw the mayor’s cold war on charter schools, happily refusing classroom space to institutions that actually offer poor and minority kids the opportunity that the regular schools don’t.

Team de Blasio has already begun its search for a new chancellor. It’ll be tough to find someone who will be as diligently indifferent to a disgraceful status quo.

Carmen Fariña, Head of New York City Schools, Is Retiring

By KATE TAYLOR and ELIZABETH A. HARRISDEC. 20, 2017

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Carmen Fariña will retire from her position as New York City’s schools chancellor in the coming months, according to city officials familiar with the discussions. Her retirement is expected to be announced on Thursday.

Ms. Fariña has run the nation’s largest school system since Mayor Bill de Blasio took office four years ago. She inherited the Department of Education from the administration of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, which had shredded the traditional playbook for running the city’s schools. It redesigned how students applied to high school, gave more power to principals, closed struggling schools and opened hundreds of new ones.

Ms. Fariña’s tenure, by contrast, bears the marks of a steady march forward. Graduation rates and test scores have risen, and she has bent a behemoth city agency toward her preferred methods, but there was no sense of the transformational turning of a great ship.

In a letter that is expected to be sent out on Thursday morning, Ms. Fariña writes, “Four years ago, Mayor de Blasio asked me to unretire at age 70 to join his leadership team and become schools chancellor.”

She writes that she “took the job with a firm belief in excellence for every student, in the dignity and joyfulness of the teaching profession, and in the importance of trusting relationships where collaboration is the driving force,” adding that she plans to “retire (again) in the coming months.”

On the most visible level, under Ms. Fariña, the department turned away from Mr. Bloomberg’s strategy of closing large, low-performing schools and opening new, smaller schools in their place. Instead, Ms. Fariña invested in a model called community schools, which aimed to raise achievement by infusing schools with social services designed to address the challenges of poverty.

The most prominent test of that theory has been the department’s Renewal Schools program. The city paired 94 struggling schools with social service organizations, in addition to providing them with coaching and an extra hour of class each day. The program has been costly — it is expected to total more than half a billion dollars by the end of this school year — and its results have been mixed. The department has decided to close or merge 33 of the schools, including a group of 14 whose fate was announced on Monday.

Where the Bloomberg administration was known for its love of data, Ms. Fariña, a career educator who was a teacher, principal, superintendent and deputy chancellor during her 50-year career, preferred to depend on her intuition, or that of her deputies. Early in her tenure, she walked into a meeting where officials were poring over spreadsheets looking for model schools and said, “I know a good quality school when I’m in the building.”

The vast majority of the 1.1 million students in New York’s schools are poor minority children, and the issue of equity hangs over the system. The sought-after schools with high graduation rates and stellar test scores have disproportionately high populations of white and Asian students, while struggling schools are largely populated by black and Hispanic children.

Many of the education department’s signature policies, like expanded pre-K, fall under the umbrella of what the city calls its Equity and Excellence for All agenda, which aims to improve every school for every child, adding computer science and Advanced Placement classes to schools, for example.

But the divides remain yawning, and the administration has attracted significant criticism for what has been called a halting and incremental approach to tackling the system’s enormous racial and socioeconomic segregation. While declaring diversity a top priority last year, Ms. Fariña said she wanted to see plans to desegregate the schools bubble up “organically” rather than be mandated from above.

Amy Stuart Wells, a professor at Columbia University’s Teachers College who studies segregation and is a member of the city’s school diversity advisory group, said Ms. Fariña’s department has paid more attention to the issue than past administrations, but that the work is just beginning.

“The release of a report and the creation of a task force is symbolically extremely important to say, ‘This is a priority,’” she said. “But where we go with it, and how deeply we address the issues of what happens inside of schools when kids get there, that will be the challenge for the next chancellor.”

To some, Ms. Fariña’s skepticism of data, and in particular her push to de-emphasize the role of test scores, has been refreshing. Aaron Pallas, a professor of sociology and education at Teachers College, said that under Mr. Bloomberg and his schools chancellor, Joel I. Klein, there was often “an active dismissal of the notion that teachers had the skills to do what they needed to do.

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“She does believe a lot in the wisdom of practice, the idea that experience imparts knowledge about how to do this kind of work of educating children that one really can’t get other ways,” Mr. Pallas said of Ms. Fariña.

While the Bloomberg administration in its final years went to war with the teacher’s union over issues like school closures, teacher evaluations, seniority rules and the status of so-called reserve teachers who had lost their positions, Mr. de Blasio and Ms. Fariña have pursued an amicable and cooperative relationship with the union. Observers say that has had benefits in terms of raising morale among teachers and reducing the level of open strife, which tends to diminish the public’s confidence in the school system, but that it has also had a price.

“Ending the war with the union was an important thing in terms of changing how people in the system felt,” Shael Polakow-Suransky, the president of Bank Street College of Education and a former senior deputy chancellor in the Bloomberg administration. “There’s a cost to that, in the sense that nothing has changed in terms of improving the constraints that you operate with in that contract, but it definitely bought peace and much less public scrutiny and much less public fighting and sort of helped with morale for teachers.”

While Ms. Farina’s letter did not explain why she had decided to retire, or who might replace her, Dorothy Siegel, a close friend of Ms. Fariña’s, said she had spoken to her last week and that Ms. Fariña had said she was going to speak to the mayor about retiring.

“She said, ‘You know, I’m going to be 75,’” Ms. Siegel said.

Ms. Siegel said she asked Ms. Fariña if she knew who her successor would be. Ms. Fariña told her she did not, saying, “It’s up to Bill.”