Rudy Crew’s Crapola

The schools superintendent’s new book is, well, full of baloney

A A A Comments (4) By Francisco Alvarado Thursday, Sep 20 2007

Tatiana Suarez

More About

Rudolph "Rudy" Crew is a busy man these days. While doing the $325,000-a-year job of running Miami-Dade County Public Schools, he has been on tour promoting his new tome, Only Connect: The Way to Save Our Schools. Since its August 7 release, he has been interviewed on National Public Radio, C-SPAN, and Kansas City's television news station Fox 4. He has gotten ink everywhere from Vanity Fair to the Daily News to the Times-Picayune. On September 11 the former New York schools chancellor paid a visit to his old stomping ground for a book-signing party at his literary agent's swanky Greenwich Village apartment.

Give the man his kudos. He certainly understands the art of self-promotion. Though media reports have been ungodly kind, Only Connect is 258 pages of platitudes and blather that becomes particularly offensive when you get to the parts about the nation's fourth-largest school district, which he runs.

For example, at the end of the first chapter, on page 25, Crew rhapsodizes, "When I walk into my office in downtown Miami, when I visit classrooms in Liberty City and Coconut Grove and Palmetto, in Homestead and Little Havana, I see children and parents and teachers looking for something good today. And they are finding it. The Miami-Dade County public school system has been called a model for the state of Florida; I think it's on its way to being a model for the nation as a whole. The system can change, and without vouchers and charter schools. Our parents will tell you that."

Earth to Rudy: The district produced 26 F schools last year, and less than 50 percent of students who started high school earned diplomas.

Zulma Alvarez scoffs when New Times reads her the passage. Outside Booker T. Washington High School on a blustery afternoon before the last bell, the single Cuban-American mother in her forties notes that one of her 17-year-old twin boys attends Booker T. "I don't see anything good," she says. "Personally I am frustrated. In fact my son wants me to put him in another school."

Booker T. is one of nine high schools in Crew's much ballyhooed School Improvement Zone, which he launched shortly after his hiring in July 2004. He describes the effort on page 223: "In Miami we decided to meet the challenge of those low-performing, low-demand schools, sapped by too many underqualified teachers. We asked our veteran teachers to be the starter dough, to begin the process of change. That meant transferring to an Improvement Zone school for three to four years. In return for higher pay, they would work longer hours and longer school years, but most important, their mission was to create successful classrooms and provide a model for other, less experienced or less skilled teachers in those schools."

Situated in the center of Overtown, Booker T. has a student population of 1362, evenly split between Hispanics and blacks. Since Crew's 2004 arrival, the school has twice been rated D and last year earned an F. According to its 2006-2007 School Improvement Zone plan, which is posted on the school district's Website, 89 percent of ninth- and tenth-grade students read below their grade level. The school's graduation rate is a dismal 36 percent. That's not a sound return on the $30 million per year in taxpayer money the school district has invested in the School Improvement Zone.

But you wouldn't know that from reading Only Connect.

It doesn't get better. On page 33 Crew proclaims himself an authority on what it takes to make a child a "mature and conscious contributor to society." He writes, "We miss personal integrity and civic awareness in our schools, but we've stopped expecting our schools to teach them." To illustrate his point, he recalls the time his daughter Lauren nagged him for brand-name tennis shoes: "She put on one of those 'I Need to Have' campaigns for a pair of sneakers she'd seen in a Janet Jackson video.... I did what we parents do more often than we should, which was take the path of least resistance. Off to Foot Locker. Lauren cheered up, and she all but hit the clouds when some salesgirl handed her the 'right' pair....

"But labels aren't what you need to work well in a team or create a new business or raise a family. You need personal integrity ... a moral center ... a sense of ethics even when you're alone."

One has to wonder if Crew ever relayed that lesson to his sons Ryan and Russell. On December 29, 2004, the brothers were arrested and charged with aggravated battery. The pair, at the time in their late twenties, allegedly beat up Patrick Dorneval outside Fat Tuesday bar in CocoWalk. Dorneval's face was left a broken, bloody mess. Prosecutors later charged Russell with petty theft for lifting a homeless man's wallet. Subsequently the Crew boys were placed on one year of probation and were ordered to pay Dorneval $25,000 in restitution.

Three months after the arrest, Crew told New Times: "I'm proud of the men they have become because I know the full measure of their character. It's regrettable that the fact that they are my sons is drawing attention to an incident that wouldn't merit it otherwise."

Check out this week's featured ad for News

Live Modern School of Music

View Ad View Website

More Ads >>

Email
to Friend

Write to
Editor

Print
Article

Jessica 06/06/2008 8:29:00 PM

Talk about horrible education! I remember when Rudy Crew was put as superintendent of our schools. All I heard from there on was FCAT FCAT FCAT! This is what they use to grade our public schools. What is so good about the FCAT? It takes out the fundamentals of learning, and we are left with only a mere part of what we should know. In fact even when I was a senior and had passed my FCAT two years prior, I was still hearing about the FCAT! I was in AP classes and honors and they still made us practice how to do FCAT excercises! Instead of focusing in the importance of a good education we are all absorbed in a test which only measures things in mere importance. The reason that we are not teaching the children correctly is because we are so intereasted in some score on some test which does not even teach the important parts of studying. Not to mention that they do not teach you how to write correctly. For those unfortunate students who do not recieve AP classes, their education is reduced to only the FCAT. For college on personal experience I have learned that in fact the way to write on the FCAT is completly different to how you are supposed to write in college, and not to mention in the real world. All I learned up until AP english was how to write five paragraphs. That was it. Five paragraphs is all I ever wrote. Never mention creative writing, there was no room for that. No room for growth of the imagination, only math and writing, and reading. Yet why if we only train the students to pass the FCAT, are all the students doing so poorly in their test? My brother was one of the children who did not pass the reading portion of the FCAT in third grade, and he was held back! Why are the children suffering for the mistakes of their elders? Many students even drop out of high school due to the fact that they can not manage to pass the FCAT. Many students that come older to the US from other countries are faced with difficulties in language, and difficulties in the FCAT which MUST be taken in english. This sets a lot of room for failure, with low qualifying teachers which non the less is due to the poor salary, and poor discipline of students. Regular classes are the worse. I could never learn anything, because the teacher was to busy having conflicts with other poorly behaved students who could not conduct themselves in proper fashion! Never the less I pray that some how things will have a better outlook since in fact our education system has done poorly to educate the new students coming in. I do not believe it is only at school, a good education starts at home with good enforcement, and good communication about the reality of life, and how important it is to be an enlightened person. But if the work is only half done, and our teachers are upset, because of their paychecks....we have nothing buy a sad cycle, and a poorly educated generation which will only lead to more headaches, and a bleak future.
Jessica 06/06/2008 7:16:00 PM

Talk about horrible education! I remember when Rudy Crew was put as superintendent of our schools. All I heard from there on was FCAT FCAT FCAT! This is what they use to grade our public schools. What is so good about the FCAT? It takes out the fundamentals of learning, and we are left with only a mere part of what we should know. In fact even when I was a senior and had passed my FCAT two years prior, I was still hearing about the FCAT! I was in AP classes and honors and they still made us practice how to do FCAT excercises! Instead of focusing in the importance of a good education we are all absorbed in a test which only measures things in mere importance. The reason that we are not teaching the children correctly is because we are so intereasted in some score on some test which does not even teach the important parts of studying. Not to mention that they do not teach you how to write correctly. For those unfortunate students who do not recieve AP classes, their education is reduced to only the FCAT. For college on personal experience I have learned that in fact the way to write on the FCAT is completly different to how you are supposed to write in college, and not to mention in the real world. All I learned up until AP english was how to write five paragraphs. That was it. Five paragraphs is all I ever wrote. Never mention creative writing, there was no room for that. No room for growth of the imagination, only math and writing, and reading. Yet why if we only train the students to pass the FCAT, are all the students doing so poorly in their test? My brother was one of the children who did not pass the reading portion of the FCAT in third grade, and he was held back! Why are the children suffering for the mistakes of their elders? Many students even drop out of high school due to the fact that they can not manage to pass the FCAT. Many students that come older to the US from other countries are faced with difficulties in language, and difficulties in the FCAT which MUST be taken in english. This sets a lot of room for failure, with low qualifying teachers which non the less is due to the poor salary, and poor discipline of students. Regular classes are the worse. I could never learn anything, because the teacher was to busy having conflicts with other poorly behaved students who could not conduct themselves in proper fashion! Never the less I pray that some how things will have a better outlook since in fact our education system has done poorly to educate the new students coming in. I do not believe it is only at school, a good education starts at home with good enforcement, and good communication about the reality of life, and how important it is to be an enlightened person. But if the work is only half done, and our teachers are upset, because of their paychecks....we have nothing buy a sad cycle, and a poorly educated generation which will only lead to more headaches, and a bleak future.
Zach 11/23/2007 8:02:00 PM

RC is a joke. He and the entire public ed system need to be overhauled and built from the ground up once again.
Longtime edreformer 10/18/2007 8:40:00 PM

It's obvious to anyone watching the M-Dade School Board meetings that the system is more corrupt than ever. The majority of the Board refuses to demand accountability from the administration for no-bid contracts, investigating the practice of increasing existing contracts without proper authority, decreasing graduation rates and student achievement and filthy conditions in some schools, to name just a few. Board Member Dr. Marta Perez understands the depth to which the district has sunk, and her courage under the fire of the arrogant and dismissive attitudes and comments from some of her colleagues and the Superintendent is an example for every reformer to follow. New Times, please continue to expose the dirty linen and maybe the authorities who can actually do something will eventually wake up. As far as the Miami Herald is concerned, you only have to look at the "partnership" it has with the district to understand why no real investigative reporting is done.