What NYC schools need in the next schools chancellor

With the news that Schools Chancellor Carmen Fariña is retiring, Mayor de Blasio says he is looking for a new chancellor to follow the blueprint he has laid out during his first four years in office. That would be a mistake.

Given the challenges our city schools continue to face, he’d be wise to look for someone willing to challenge his assumptions and chart a very different course.

De Blasio’s greatest first-term failure may be the teachers’ contract. Instead of using negotiations for a new agreement with the United Federation of Teachers to reform the system, City Hall gave away the store without demanding any work-rule changes.

It was a contract that put the needs of adults ahead of students, secured coincidentally after a well-timed $350,000 donation to the mayor’s political-action committee. The UFT’s influence with de Blasio resulted in a long-term sweetheart deal for the union and ensured that the contract wouldn’t be opened up again until the mayor was out of office or had won a second term.

That contract expires in 2019 and will likely be negotiated with City Hall and the next chancellor in 2018. This will be the major test of Fariña’s successor — will he or she be able to prioritize student learning needs over the union’s demands?

The next chancellor must also reject the failed Renewal Schools program that has squandered half a billion dollars and kept students in struggling schools since the program’s inception in 2014. He or she must actually review the evidence, which will show that the Bloomberg-era approach — closing schools and opening new, small ones — led to better student outcomes.

Tens of thousands of students are consigned to failing schools simply because of where their parents can afford to live. That’s wrong, and the next chancellor must make it a personal mission to move with great urgency to open better schools.

The mayor’s pick must also improve teacher quality, an issue City Hall has ignored completely. In four years, the only step the Department of Education has taken on this front is backward — attempting to place hundreds of teachers from the Absent Teacher Reserve into classrooms against the will of their principals.

The next chancellor must work with stakeholders to enact an effective teacher-evaluation system, pay better teachers more, place teachers in schools according to their effectiveness and the needs of the students and ensure that ineffective teachers can be removed from the classroom.

Farina’s successor must acknowledge the fact that the demand for charter-school seats is based on charters’ results and parents’ desire to get their kids into schools that will give them the skills they need to succeed. Bureaucratic inertia and ideology should be no excuse to delay. A new chancellor must act as a protector of kids, not of the system, and support great schools of any kind.

And finally, the next chancellor must create a culture where test data have a value for teachers and parents and are used to improve teacher and school performance. The mayor’s pick must particularly embrace accountability — everyone is sick of de Blasio proclaiming transcendent achievement and failing to accept any responsibility for the children being woefully underserved.

In sum, the next chancellor must stand up to the mayor, negotiate a revolutionary teachers’ contract, end de Blasio’s failed Renewal program, work with urgency to open new schools, take a different approach to teacher quality, support charter schools, use test data and embrace accountability.

None of it will be easy, but it’s the most coveted education job in the nation for a reason: You can impact the lives of more than a million students and chart a course for other cities to follow. If you try and tackle any of these challenges, we will support you.

Jenny Sedlis is executive director of StudentsFirstNY.