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Bad Apple

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That report was mentioned in the book Standardized Minds: The High Price of America's Testing Culture and What We Can Do to Change It, by author and Pulitzer Prize-nominated journalist Peter Sacks. In fact he dedicated a whole chapter to Crew. "The Tacoma story wasn't about student achievement," Sacks wrote. "This was political theater featuring an ambitious and dynamic Rudy Crew and a school board hungry to prove that its schools weren't a mess."

Today Sacks says Crew represents a breed of superintendent that is more politician than educator. "The best of them know how to manipulate their environment to their advantage," Sacks says. "They are like Wall Street investors who are always searching for short-term gains in stock prices that may or may not be good for the company. That is what happened in Tacoma."

Crew will "hop around from school district to school district, do these quick and dirty turnarounds. But when he leaves, it crashes," Sacks adds.

After Tacoma, though, Crew was a hot commodity. In 1995 he snagged the top job as the schools chancellor in New York City, with a $195,000 annual salary and free use of a Brooklyn townhouse. Two years later the New York Legislature gave Crew the power to appoint and remove superintendents in the five boroughs.

During the early part of his tenure, he worked alongside then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani to fix the Big Apple's poorly run public schools. But Crew could not control Edward Stancik, the special commissioner of investigations, who exposed several scandals.

One incident presaged problems the chancellor would have a decade later at Miami Northwestern Senior High: In September 1997 Stancik released a report criticizing officials at August Martin High School, where a female student had been allegedly raped by four members of the varsity football team in an empty classroom. "Had swift action been taken, it is possible that the rape could have been prevented, or, at the very least, interrupted," Stancik wrote. "Even more disturbing, after the rape, when Student A disclosed her suffering to two staff members, they all but ignored her, forcing the girl to shoulder the burden of the sexual assault by herself and encounter her attackers on a daily basis."

Stancik also discovered that August Martin staff members withheld information from investigators and made inaccurate statements to the press. Although he reassigned the assistant principals after the scandal, Crew refused to remove Principal Richard Ross despite Stancik's recommendation and parents' outrage. According to news articles, Crew personally investigated the incident and found that "sufficient additional information" convinced him firing Ross was inappropriate.

Two years later Crew ran into more trouble with Stancik, who uncovered a scandal that also parallels a Miami problem. Stancik exposed that Crew's office of special investigations was aware many teachers were changing students' grades on flunked tests, but did nothing. One of Crew's top New York lieutenants, then-Special Investigations Director Marlene Malamy, played a major role in the misdoing.

(Last year Miami-Dade School Police investigated allegations that Charles Drew Middle School Principal Gwen Coverson had changed 150 D and F grades without consulting the responsible teachers. The officers released a 37-page report claiming the allegations could not be substantiated because whistleblowers failed to cooperate with investigators. But the educators who fingered Coverson contend detectives never contacted them. In a September 30, 2006 Miami Herald article, former Charles Drew teacher Robert Morris said investigators "never returned my calls or asked me to come in for an interview.")

In December 1999 the New York City Board of Education bought out the final six months of Crew's contract after he and Mayor Giuliani bickered over the use of student vouchers. Crew was against them, while Giuliani supported them. The chancellor returned to the Pacific Northwest, where he launched an educational leadership institute at the University of Washington. Sixteen months later, he left to work for a San Francisco area foundation before moving to Miami.

Perez is concerned about the similarities between Crew's past and present woes. "You see the same patterns being repeated here," Perez says. "Crew handled the Northwestern situation terribly. This was a complete embarrassment to the school district."

For more than two decades, Herbert Cousins headed field offices and trained undercover FBI agents. In 1990 he led a group that arrested Miami cult leader Yahweh ben Yahweh and 15 disciples of his sect on racketeering and capital murder charges. "I risked my life on a number of occasions to get the job done," Cousins explains.

So in 2003, he was an easy choice for a group of lawmen tasked to recommend a candidate to become the Miami-Dade school board's first inspector general. In May of that year the board unanimously awarded Cousins, who is also a former teacher and principal, a $140,000 annual salary and the power to weed out waste and fraud.

Unfortunately Cousins no longer holds the title, thanks in part to Rudy Crew. On a recent afternoon, the former G-man met with New Times at the Panera Bread café in Weston, near his home, to talk about the superintendent. "It was not a good relationship because of his dictatorial management style," says Cousins, who speaks in a soft baritone and sports prescription sunglasses that conceal his steely brown eyes. "There was nothing Rudy Crew could do or say to intimidate me or make me violate investigative protocol."

In a civil lawsuit filed March 6, Cousins alleges Crew conspired with several others to plant unflattering stories in the press that eventually forced him out. He is among four former high-ranking school district employees who have sued the Miami-Dade superintendent in the past two years.

Crew wanted Cousins out, Cousins claims, because "I refused to allow him to interfere or control my office's investigations." According to the former inspector general's complaint, sometime during summer 2005, the superintendent became upset because he believed Cousins and law enforcement agencies were investigating him as well as school board members. The suit alleges, "Desperate to assess the scope of the criminal investigations of the upper levels of MDCPS [Miami-Dade County Public Schools], Crew approached Cousins proclaiming his belief that certain sitting school board members were engaged in serious ongoing criminal corrupt activities and claiming he had been misled into signing contracts."

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