New York City will pay more than $2 million in settlement with three white women who sued the city’s education department for allegedly demoting them in favor of “less-qualified people of color.”
The three senior education officials—Lois Herrera, Jaye Murray, and Laura Feijoo, will each receive $700,000, reported the New York Post.
The city admitted no wrongdoing in the settlement. It launched a motion to dismiss the allegations in November 2022, only to have a federal judge in January rule that there was “evidence of a policy of race-based discrimination” and allow the case to proceed.
“The DOE and City are fully committed to fair and inclusive employment practices, and we maintain that these claims lack merit,” a City Hall spokesperson said. “Nevertheless, settlement of this long-standing case was in the best interest of all parties.”
The settlement will conclude a five-year legal saga that began when the trio filed a $90 million discrimination lawsuit challenging the department’s aggressive race-focused leadership changes under then-Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza, who made so-called racial equity a centerpiece of his agenda upon taking office in 2018.
In one of his largest and most expensive initiatives, Mr. Carranza ordered all of the city’s educators to undergo “anti-bias” training and confront “implicit racial biases” within themselves.
He also sought to tear down the city’s Gifted and Talented program that uses performance criteria when selecting students, accusing the program of perpetuating racial disparities by disproportionally admitting white and Asian children.
The 2019 lawsuit specifically targeted the Carranza administration’s use of race when filling senior-level positions.
According to the complaint, all three white women were abruptly removed from their roles, with their non-white replacements getting the jobs after “a tap on the shoulder.”
Ms. Herrera, a Harvard graduate, was employed by the Education Department in 1986 as a guidance counselor and worked her way up to head its Office of Safety and Youth Development. She claimed that one of Mr. Carranza’s deputies stripped her of the title and replaced her with a black man who has a GED, the equivalent of a high school diploma.
Ms. Murray, who was honored by the state as the social worker of the year in 2017, similarly began working at the department as a rank-and-file employee before rising to become the executive director of the Office of Counseling and Support Programs.
After Mr. Carranza assumed his role as chancellor, Ms. Murray was told to report to a black man who had “never been a counselor or social worker,” and that the work for which she was responsible was taken over by another black man.
A third woman, Ms. Feijoo, was supervising all 46 of New York City’s superintendents. She claimed that Mr. Carranza went out of his way to replace her with a black woman who at the time “lacked the required NY licensing.”
“Carranza has improperly conflated the daunting task of addressing tough socioeconomic challenges facing many of the students in the New York City public school system with a discriminatory belief that caucasians in the DOE workplace, particularly more senior caucasian women, are causing or exacerbating those challenges,” their complaint read.
‘What’s Wrong With That?’
“The children in New York City—70 percent of whom are black and brown children—get to see senior-level administrators that look like them. What’s wrong with that?” he said at an unrelated event in 2019 when asked about the lawsuit.“And they happen to be extremely well-qualified individuals who at any moment could get tapped to lead their own school system anywhere across this country.”
Mr. Carranza also attributed his focus on racial equity to his boss, Mayor Bill de Blasio.
“There is no daylight between Mayor de Blasio and myself in terms of what we believe in, what our aspirations are for the children of New York City,” he said.
In February 2021, Mr. Carranza resigned from his post amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
Meisha Ross Porter, the Bronx executive superintendent, succeeded him to become the first black woman to oversee New York City’s 1,800 schools and 1.1 million students.
Mr. de Blasio, who hired Mr. Carranza with an explicit agenda to promote racial equity in the nation’s largest public school system, left office in December 2021.
