#Working for company that won big contracts when he ran NYC schools

As chancellor of the city’s public schools, Richard Carranza talked endlessly about equity. Now it seems he was using the job to build his own “equity.”

In late February, Carranza announced his exit as of March 15, tearing up as he said he needed time to grieve 11 family and close childhood friends lost to the coronavirus.

Now comes news that Carranza has taken a job with California firm IXL Learning, an e-learning company that landed $3.3 million in contracts from the city Department of Education on his watch, and about $5.6 million since 2011.

The Post’s Susan Edelman reports that the Silicon Valley firm collected $2.1 million this school year and $1.2 million year before, profiting greatly from the DOE’s rush to make remote instruction work.

IXL sells educational software on math, language arts, science and social students for grades K-12, programs now installed in some 500,000 city-bought iPads handed to students as the pandemic shuttered schools (and the United Federation of Teachers kept them closed).

Hilariously, ethics rules mean Carranza can’t work on IXL’s accounts with the city for a year. Yet cynics will suggest he’s already gotten plenty of value out of New York for the company, which surely made it easier for him to get the new job. Indeed, its income from the DOE was rising on his watch even pre-COVID.

Michelle Caruso-Cabrera, a Republican running for city comptroller, is calling for an independent investigation into any conflict-of-interest rule-breaking or bending of procurement rules here. “It’s outrageous that millions of taxpayer dollars were awarded by the DOE to a company whose learning programs have been blasted by parents and students at the same time that the former school chancellor was interviewing for a high-powered position at that same company,” she told The Post.

It stinks to high heaven that IXL Learning’s new “chief of strategy and global development” was in charge of city schools at a time when the company made out like a bandit. Current Comptroller Scott Stringer and/or the Conflicts of Interest Board should certainly take a look.

If it turns out to be perfectly legal, then the city needs better protection against such incestuous games.