Incoming Schools Chancellor Carmen Fariña is an old-school New Yorker, a born educator who grew up in Brooklyn before it was trendy and never left the neighborhood.
The 70-year-old city schools veteran was lured out of retirement by Mayor de Blasio for the top job, receiving the high-profile appointment on Monday.
The assignment caps a four-decade career as a city educator, one that she says was always inspired by her upbringing as the daughter of working-class Spanish immigrants.
“It was a different era, and women didn’t always aspire to other things. But being a teacher was always seen as a very noble calling,” Fariña, whose family lived in Cobble Hill back when it was still called South Brooklyn, told the Daily News during an exclusive interview on Tuesday.
“Being a teacher allows you to change the world.”
Fariña’s first student was her little brother, whom she tried to teach the alphabet to before she was out of elementary school herself.
“I think I made him miserable,” she joked. “He was still too young to learn it.”
Fariña attended elementary school at St. Charles Borromeo in Brooklyn Heights, where a teacher marked her absent for weeks because she couldn’t pronounce Fariña’s last name or identify her in the room.
Fariña said the experience of being looked over taught her the importance of building strong connections between schools and families.
She then attended an all-girls high school, St. Michael’s in Manhattan, and was the first in her family to earn a college diploma when she graduated from New York University.
Fariña brought a community-oriented approach to teaching fourth grade at Public School 29 in the 1960s and ’70s. At the time, the Cobble Hill school served a high-poverty community made up mainly of migrants from Puerto Rico.
“As a Spanish speaker, I became a liaison to the community,” said Fariña. “There were a lot of social issues taking place. I ended up being a parent to the parents.”
Fariña’s work in the neighborhood extended beyond the classroom. She took students on weekend field trips upstate, and invited parents into her home for parent-teacher conferences, where they felt more comfortable talking about other issues that might be affecting a student’s performance, like poverty or the absence of a father.
Her approach foreshadowed the “community schools” model that offers support services within school walls, which de Blasio has said he’ll create on 100 campuses in high-poverty areas throughout the city.
“She was the best teacher I ever had and an important person in my life in general,” said the celebrated novelist Jonathan Lethem, a former student who dedicated his first book to Fariña. “She focused on us with this laser-beam attentiveness. I felt like the whole class was for me.”
Now poised to take over the nation’s largest school system, the married grandmother of three aims to bring a progressive approach to running the city’s 1,800 schools.
She faces a long list of daunting challenges as she attempts to follow through on de Blasio’s campaign vows to scale back the role of testing, remake the city’s school accountability systems and negotiate a new contract with the teachers union.
She kicked off her term by holding a series of face-to-face meetings with staffers at the Education Department headquarters on Monday. One of her first acts will be to have the Office of Family and Community Engagement report to her directly, a signal that she aims to bring parents into the fold.
“I want to be directly involved in how we roll out what we’re doing to parents,” said Fariña. “Everyone is going to be treated with respect.”
To find classes in your area, check out the Daily News Events calendar.
