Chancellors of the New York City school system routinely come and go.
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Rudy Crew was schools chancellor for four years in the 1990s. After successful stints elsewhere, he's back in a new role to help struggling schools in central Brooklyn.
Chancellors of the New York City school system routinely come and go. I’ve reported on 13 different ones during my 28 years at the Daily News, starting with Nate Quinones during the Ed Koch era.
But once they leave, ex-chancellors almost never look back.
So it is noteworthy that one of them, Rudy Crew, has not only returned to a major education post in this city, but is spearheading an ambitious drive to transform 80 low-performing public schools in central Brooklyn.
Crew, some may recall, served as schools chancellor for four years in the late 1990s before he fell out of favor with Mayor Rudy Giuliani and was hounded out of office. He then sought education posts elsewhere, serving for several years as superintendent of Miami-Dade County schools, and most recently as chief education officer for Oregon’s public schools.
Then in 2013, Crew quietly returned to New York as president of Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn. At the time, that City University campus was reeling from a sharp decline in student enrollment.
Since then, Crew has turned the college around, increasing its student population by more than 10% — from 5,900 to 6,600.
Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams has set aside $4 million to help Crew turnaround 80 low-performing schools.
But he’s done something even more surprising. He’s reached beyond the Medgar Evers campus to fashion what he calls a “new seamless connection from the public schools to college.”
His approach to education reform has so impressed a few philanthropic foundations and local politicians that some are already suggesting a future return for him as public schools chancellor.
Soon after his arrival at Medgar Evers, Crew met with Schools Chancellor Carmen Fariña and offered to assist schools near his college. The chancellor welcomed the offer, so he promptly hosted 80 principals from three central Brooklyn school districts where test scores were abysmal, and asked those principals what they needed.
“I learned from them that they felt besieged by the emphasis on more charter schools, by a national movement to blame teachers, parents and principals, and by test mania, an atmosphere that says ‘get those test scores up and all will be right with the world,’ ” Crew said in an interview.
None of this, he said, was helping teachers and principals improve school performance.