The superintendent mill in urban districts

September 12, 1:36 PMSF Education ExaminerCaroline Grannan

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Crew: feet of clay

I'm posting about the schools way down in Miami because an old story is being repeated there.

The Miami-Dade School District hired Rudy Crew in 2004 with a compensation package that made national headlines. Now he's out, though his dissatisfied employers bought out his contract rather than firing him.

Crew is one of the big names in the superintendent biz, a previous chancellor of New York City Schools. He worked in San Francisco a few years ago, in a top job with the WestEd foundation, and has been on SFUSD's short list for superintedent at least once, maybe more.

Noted education writer Jonathan Kozol expounded in his book Shame of the Nation about the pattern with urban superintendents, and I in turn blogged about Kozol's comments in October 2005, when Arlene Ackerman was under fire in San Francisco. Here's what I said then, invoking Kozol:

Kozol decries "the high set of expectations that attach themselves to changes in the topmost personnel" in school leadership — what I call, less elegantly, the media gushfest. This all seemed so traumatic in San Francisco, but it's actually the usual routine. The new hire soars into town in a shining chariot borne aloft by glowing press coverage, sets to work on a set of intractable societal problems, turns into an sweating, beaten-down, flawed human, and is run out of town in disgust or rage.

What's interesting is that Kozol's chapter on urban superintendents covered Rudy Crew's New York stint as part of the pattern, quoting Crew. From my blog post:

... Rudy Crew ... talked to Kozol about being "greeted with a chorus of applause" on arriving, and later fired after a "bludgeoning" that gave him a "sense of visceral insult" and that he views as "tinged with racial condescension." Crew, who is African-American, was in the running when Ackerman was hired here and is now in Miami, the nation's highest-paid superintendent.

The racial issue has come up in the Miami situation too. From Education Week's account:

... Mr. Crew, who is African-American, said his work was “politicized” by board and community members.

“I didn’t pay homage to what they call ‘the community,’ meaning the Cuban community,” he said. “I was too busy trying to pay attention to the children of the larger community. ...In my book, it’s the Haitian community, the African-American community, the Jamaican community, and it is in fact the Hispanic community, but not just Cubans; there are Nicaraguans, Puerto Ricans, and lots of other people here.

“There is a racial tension that exists here in Miami that they defined me as being against the Cuban community.”

I know "the race card" draws scorn, and now Crew has played it in New York and Miami too. But Kozol (who is white) isn't afraid to point to race as a factor. Here are his words:

James Baldwin had written of black leaders who were given a limited degree of power to control and, if they could, relieve some of the miseries of Harlem 50 years ago. Speaking of "the nicely refined torture a man can experience from having been created and defeated by the same circumstances," Baldwin wrote, "the best that one can say is that they are in an impossible position" and that those "who are motivated by genuine concern maintain this position with heartbreaking dignity." That precarious sense of dignity, often protected by reliance upon hyperbolic claims and a progressively more glazed and fragile smile, may be noted among good black and Hispanic school officials to the present day. Too much is expected of them when they come; too little is accorded to them when they leave. The structures of apartheid and inequity that have defeated them remain unchanged."

Realistically, I don't know. I did feel that Arlene Ackerman took flak in our district from people who expected deference, who  might have found her "top-down" style just fine in a male authority figure. In my view that's more likely because she's a woman (a middle-aged one) than because she's African-American.

It may be that this is such an impossible job that anyone would be crushed by its demands and what Kozol describes as "the structures of apartheid and inequity that have defeated" the once-confident has-been superintendents.