New NYC Schools Head Wades Into Race With Tweet

The new head of New York City’s schools waded into controversy Friday with a late-night tweet that seemed to accuse some white parents of not wanting their kids to go to school with black children.

Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza retweeted an article with the headline, “WATCH: Wealthy white Manhattan parents angrily rant against plan to bring more black kids to their schools.”

The headline by a site was about a meeting on Tuesday where some parents expressed anger over a plan to increase diversity at middle schools on the Upper West Side by reserving 25 percent of their seats for students scoring low on tests.

Some parents attending the meeting said the diversity plan might result in high-performing children being shut out of their first-choice schools.

One woman complained the school would be “telling an 11-year-old, ‘You worked [hard] and you didn’t get that, what you needed and wanted.’”

Carranza’s 1 a.m. Friday retweet was widely shared on social media.

“New NYC Chancellor is looking mad woke out here,” tweeted journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant winner for her reporting on school segregation.

Asked about the retweet, Mayor Bill de Blasio said, “Look, I don’t think he at all intends to vilify anyone. He’s not that type of person.”

A spokeswoman for Carranza, who took over the city’s 1.1 million-pupil public school system this month, said he stands by the tweet but wants to clarify that the headline was not his.