#Top educrats’ musical chairs spell more rocky times for NY school kids

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Betty Rosa, now the interim State Education Department commissioner.
AP

School kids around the state — already facing a tough year, thanks to the pandemic — got more bad news last week: Rocky leadership at the state’s education bureaucracy just got a little rockier.

Betty Rosa will now run the state Education Department on an interim basis. She’ll be moving on from her position as Regents chancellor, thus leaving two essentially temporary bosses at the helm — Rosa at SED and Vice Chancellor T. Andrew Brown as the presiding officer at the Regents board.

The shake-up makes her the fourth educrat to take over the department in just the past year alone — following resignations by MaryEllen Elia, who left last August; Beth Berlin, who quit after a few weeks; and Shannon Tahoe, who retired last week. Alas, from the perspective of kids, Rosa is as wrong for the new job as she was for the old one.

As we’ve noted before, ever since the Regents forced Merryl Tisch to step down as chancellor in 2015 and installed Rosa in her place, the group has been intent on getting kids through — and out of — school as quickly as possible, whether they’re ready or not.

They’ve rolled back standards considerably, eased pathways to graduation and weakened teacher evaluations. Rosa herself is a staunch opponent of testing: She’s called the Regents exams “rigid” and faulted them for too many students “leaving high school without a diploma.”

In September, the Regents set up a Blue Ribbon Commission on New York State Diplomas, surely a fig leaf for watering down graduation requirements even more.

As interim commissioner, Rosa will be implementing policies and programs she herself pushed through as chancellor — policies, alas, that haven’t moved the needle on student performance one bit.

On the other hand, her new post is surely great news to the teachers’ unions: Not only do they share her disdain for testing, which too often highlights a failure to adequately educate kids; they also both oppose charter schools — which are generally non-union-run and which pose stiff competition for regular public schools.

Nor has Rosa lifted a finger to weed out ineffective teachers. The unions are no doubt grateful for that. And when they’re happy, so is Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie, who’s always on the lookout to please the union bosses.

Under the state Constitution, Heastie gets to control the Regents and, in effect, pick SED’s boss. Which means Rosa is now in a prime spot for a permanent appointment there — a post that pays a cool $324,000 a year.

New York school kids might be better off with more turmoil.