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Fariña’s Limitations

RON ISAAC
Posted 1/22/18

According to the Big Bang theory, when the universe was created, matter was dispersed unimaginable distances within billionths of a second. Parlay that knowledge into an appreciation of New York City’s education bureaucracy and you will have a generous estimate of the time lapse between the moment that Schools Chancellor Carmen Fariña’s announced departure takes effect, accompanied by celebratory lamentation, and the instant her legacy will breach the walls of eternal forgetfulness and dissipate from memory.

She was, granted, a vast improvement over her immediate predecessors, Klein, Black and Walcott, who were detritus from the Bloomberg administration. But they were such abominations that any successor who did not undertake with gusto the complete ruination of our public schools, as they did, would shine by comparison. Her sweet grandmotherly countenance, copious credentials, half-century of time served, and professed-but-imperfectly-thought-through-and-applied egalitarian principles did not aggravate the existing system and she did not create her own brand of harmfulness.

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