When Rudy Crew talks about education, his passion can lead to an apology. "I'm yelling at you," he says midway through a recent interview. "I'm sorry."
Two weeks later, Crew cranks up the volume again, this time as he concludes a speech in front of the Emerald City Rotary Club.
“I’m sorry,” he tells the breakfast gathering. “I’m yelling at you.”
In neither case was Crew angry. Like a preacher punctuating a sermon, he’d simply reached an emotional crescendo in his relentless argument that every child can learn—a mantra that’s inspired him every step of the way on his climb to the top of the education profession.
“I push very hard because I don't think there's anything we're asking young people to do today that they can't do.”
Rudy Crew
“I push very hard because I don’t think there’s anything we’re asking young people to do today that they can’t do,” explains Crew. “And it doesn’t matter to me where they came from. I don’t allow that to be a limitation.”
UW President Richard L. McCormick chuckles when told of Crew’s vehemence. After all, Crew’s enthusiasm is a big reason McCormick aggressively recruited the former chancellor of New York City public schools to breathe life into the University’s new Institute for K-12 Leadership.
“He’s a brilliant and charismatic school leader,” says McCormick. “That’s it in a nutshell.”
The goal of the leadership institute is to provide ongoing training and support for principals, superintendents and others guiding public education in the 21st century. The institute is a component of the University’s overall K-12 education strategy, which is to support the state’s schools in several ways.
What exactly will the leadership institute do? Ultimately, whatever Crew decides. Until he arrived, the institute existed only on paper. “I think this is a pretty clean canvas,” says Crew.
McCormick agrees: “My vision is Rudy’s vision.”
Crew was McCormick’s first—and only—choice to launch the leadership institute. McCormick says he eventually would have sought other candidates, “but as long as Rudy was potentially available, I waited.”
McCormick’s wait began in 1998 after Crew delivered a keynote speech to the UW Board of Regents. The regents were laying the groundwork for what would become the University’s official K-12 strategic direction and Crew “made a dazzling impression,” recalls McCormick. “He more or less set the agenda.”
“He has a very clear vision of what he wants to accomplish, which is academic achievement for every kid. ”
Joseph Olchefske, Seattle School District superintendent
So strong was Crew’s performance that McCormick began corresponding with Crew following his return to New York. The reason? “I knew I wanted to make a run at bringing Rudy to the University,” says McCormick.
At the time, McCormick didn’t know exactly what Crew’s role would be. He only knew that the political clock is always ticking for Big Apple school chancellors and Crew was “worth waiting for.”
A few months later, McCormick upped the ante. As UW administrators and regents continued to explore how the University could best support K-12 education, they concluded that improved leadership was a critical need and that a leadership institute was the best answer. Midway through 1999, McCormick told Crew that the executive director’s job was his “whenever you’re ready.”
Thanks to a showdown with New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani over school vouchers, Crew was ready in a matter of months. As soon as McCormick learned Crew and Giuliani were at odds, the President jumped on the phone and repeated his offer.
On Feb. 1, Crew officially became executive director of the Institute for K-12 Leadership—and its first employee.
Crew is no stranger to the Northwest. Before going to New York, he was superintendent of the Tacoma School District from 1993-95. Even after moving to the East Coast, he held onto a house he had just bought near Gig Harbor, where he now makes his home once again. Crew is married and has four grown children.
Seattle School District Superintendent Joseph Olchefske applauds the formation of the institute and the choice of Crew to guide it.
“The need for leadership at every level … is enormous,” he says. “The University has set dead aim on that focus and I think it is the right target to shoot at.”
Crew's heart may be big, but there's no room for those who lack his conviction that every child—regardless of socio-economic status—can succeed.
Olchefske says the demand for improved leadership reflects a “revolution” in public education centered on the creation of new—and higher—academic standards. For years, superintendents, principals and others exercised leadership by maintaining the status quo. Today, they must be “change agents,” says Olchefske. “That’s a very major change in identity and role and function.”
Olchefske calls Crew a “superb leader. He’s truly one of the smart people in our profession. I can’t say enough positive things about him.
“He has a very clear vision of what he wants to accomplish, which is academic achievement for every kid. He has an incisive intelligence about what it takes to accomplish that. And he has deep passion and a big heart that animates everything he does.”
Crew’s heart may be big, but there’s no room for those who lack his conviction that every child—regardless of socio-economic status—can succeed.
“He doesn’t suffer that very well,” says Allen Glenn, retiring dean of the UW College of Education.
During his talk at the Emerald City Rotary Club, Crew recalled an incident in New York when an elementary principal invited him to visit his school. The school’s test scores had dropped after a new housing complex opened near the school. The principal told Crew that most of the children who lived there couldn’t speak English and blamed their arrival for the falling scores.
The Rotarians gasped when Crew recalled his response to the principal: “I appreciate the fact you invited me to your school … but you’re fired. You need to leave. And you need to leave today.”
“I watch Tiger Woods with his father and it was very much like that for me. He was a firm, stern, no-nonsense person. There were no winds in my life other than him.”
Rudy Crew
Crew believes public education is on the brink of “having the lights turned off permanently” unless leaders “suspend their disbelief” and commit themselves to the proposition that all children are born with a brain and therefore all children—whether from the suburbs or the inner city—can learn.
“There’s no room for people who don’t have the courage to do the work,” says Crew.
Olchefske, who this spring decided not to renew the contracts of four Seattle principals, agrees that times of transition demand tough measures—all the more reason to focus on leadership.
“Decisiveness is a critical quality that leaders have in periods of change,” he says. “And Rudy has that. That’s the role of being a superintendent. You have to make those decisions.”
Crew, 49, was born and raised in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., about an hour away from New York City. His mother died of cancer when he was 2, leaving his father to bring up Crew and his two older sisters by himself. “I was poor like a lot of black kids at that point in my life,” recalls Crew.
For Crew, the notion that every child can learn is more than a politically correct slogan. When he looks at charts showing an inverse relationship between the ethnic diversity of school populations and academic achievement, the discrepancy hits home.
“I came from what a lot of these children are in now,” he says. “While I care about all children, there’s a particular emphasis in my heart (on children of color).”
Crew decries the “wash, rinse and spin” model of education in which students are quickly categorized and placed in special programs. Sometimes, expectations are lowered “because they’ve had a hard life.”
Rising test scores are just one side of success. For Crew, it all begins with giving kids confidence they can learn.
“Bullshit!” says Crew. Educators who lower their expectations based on a student’s circumstances may have their hearts in the right place, but they are doing more harm than good, he says.
“They don’t know how to stop that behavior,” says Crew.
Crew’s notion of great expectations transcends the classroom. He believes just as passionately in what he calls personal, social and occupational adequacy—turning out truthful, caring and respectful human beings.
“We’ve shied away from that one. We got timid about it. I think that’s a cop out. Children want to know right from wrong.”
When Crew visited inner-city schools, students who greeted him with a friendly, “Yo, Chance! Wassup?” found themselves pulled aside for a private conversation about the difference between what’s appropriate in the street and what’s appropriate elsewhere.
Too often, says Crew, “we let them pass through that moment without telling them there are different rules.”
Many of the leadership skills Crew hopes to share with others were passed on to him by his late father, Eugene. “His lessons in that regard have been the way I understand leadership,” says Crew. “It’s not about ducking and dodging and playing a game. … It means stand up for something.”
Eugene, a former jazz musician who worked as a security guard, instilled a strong sense of personal discipline. “I watch Tiger Woods with his father and it was very much like that for me,” says Crew. “He was a firm, stern, no-nonsense person. There were no winds in my life other than him.”
Crew says his father taught him that “winning and losing meant something. How you won or lost meant even more.”
Crew’s father set high expectations—”you might even say cruel expectations”—for young Rudy in everything he did from school to sports. Painful as it may have been, the struggle to meet those expectations equipped Crew for success as an adult and shaped his tough-love approach to education.
“I still believe that what you put in is what you get out.”
Rudy Crew
“I still believe that what you put in is what you get out,” he says.
Crew attended Babson, a small business college outside Boston. He had planned to become a buyer at a men’s clothing store, but changed his mind after coaching inner-city children during the summers. He went on to earn a master’s in education and a doctorate in school administration, both from the University of Massachusetts.
Crew’s résumé could be titled “Been There, Done That.” As a teacher, principal, assistant superintendent and superintendent in cities from coast to coast, Crew has acquired a wealth of professional and political knowledge about how to run effective schools.
“If you were to go out and say we’re looking for superintendent candidates, give me five names from around the country, he’d be one of them,” says Glenn.
Crew was superintendent in Sacramento when Tacoma came knocking in 1993. “He came in charged by the board to raise student achievement,” recalls Gay Campbell, the Tacoma School District’s former director of community relations. “He was very insistent that would happen.”
One of his first moves was to bring the Efficacy Institute to Tacoma to help establish a culture of high expectations among staff. The institute’s guiding premise is that if a child can master language by age 3, he or she can succeed in school, explains Campbell.
Besides raising expectations, Crew worked to align the district’s curriculum more closely with its assessments and strove to teach students how to prepare for and take standardized tests.
Not everyone went along. “He was trying to change schools,” says Campbell. “I’m sure if you really searched, you could find people who were threatened by that.”
For the most part, however, the school board and community were impressed, says Campbell. Unfortunately for Tacoma, so was the New York Board of Education. “Basically, they came after him,” says Campbell.
Crew’s jump to the Big Apple created some hard feelings in Tacoma. “When he came in, many people thought he would stay four or five years,” says Campbell. “There were people who felt he had not completed the work he started in Tacoma.”
At the time, Crew called the opportunity to become chancellor in New York “the crown jewel” of his career. And even though he’s been gone for nine months, a piece of his heart remains in Gotham.
One afternoon last spring, the phone in his office at the leadership institute wouldn’t stop ringing as former colleagues and reporters kept calling from New York to talk about the test results that had been released earlier that day.
“They’re up,” Crew explained to his visitor. “All 32 school districts. This is the third time it’s happened in my term.” He paused. “My previous term.”
Saying all children can achieve is one thing. Making it happen is another. Rising test scores are just one side of success. For Crew, it all begins with giving kids confidence they can learn. But it doesn’t stop there. In New York, he:
It was significant change for a school system with 32 districts, 1,100 schools, 75,000 teachers, 1.1 million students—and one thorny mayor.
To the surprise of many, Crew and Giuliani forged a congenial and productive relationship, sharing cigars, attending ballgames together and even playing an April Fool’s Day joke on their aides by secretly trading places at one another’s staff meetings.
Even so, history dictated the honeymoon would not last forever. “Nobody can be chancellor of the New York school system for long,” says McCormick. “It’s too tough of a job.”
The chancellor serves at the pleasure of the New York school board. And board members are political appointees—with two of the seven members appointed directly by the mayor. As a result, chancellors must negotiate a political minefield. Sooner or later, even popular leaders such as Crew fall victim.
Crew “fell out of favor,” a euphemism for getting fired, when he steadfastly opposed Giuliani’s desire to introduce an experimental voucher program.
As he set the stage for a run at the U.S. Senate, Giuliani echoed the Republican Party’s enthusiasm for using public funds to help low-income parents pay for private school tuition. Calling it “the most important thing that has to be done with education in America,” Giuliani said vouchers would create competition that would force public schools to improve.
Crew’s objection was simple: diverting tax dollars to private education could set a precedent that would spell the beginning of the end for public schools, which in many cases already are underfunded.
An avid fisherman and gardener, Crew enjoys the waterfront view from his office in the UW fisheries building and loves to stroll the leafy campus, but says he’d still be in New York if negotiations to renew his contract had not collapsed.
“Oh yeah,” he sighs.
For Crew, it came down to practicing what his father had preached back in Poughkeepsie. “In every person’s life, there are places where lines have to be drawn,” he says.
By drawing a line in New York, Crew opened a door to Seattle. With a September target for getting the institute off the drawing board and into action, Crew spent his first few months here “running, running, running.”
Crew had to set up the office, hire an 11-person staff and travel throughout the state introducing himself, forming partnerships and collecting suggestions.
Crew envisions the leadership institute functioning much like a consultant in private business, offering a set of professional services to school leaders at all levels—from superintendents to teachers to parent groups. Specifically, the institute can conduct case studies, help districts redraft policies and act as a third-party in discussions between management and unions, says Crew.
Ongoing professional resources such as those are rare, says Crew. One-shot workshops and seminars help, but the institute will ensure that “on the following Monday after the speech, there is still someone available.”
Crew wants to provide struggling school districts and their leaders with successful examples “so people can see this is a doable job.”
“That’s why they keep calling me to recruit me,” says Crew. “I believe it’s doable.”
McCormick knows Crew is a “hot property”—published reports linked his name to the vacant Los Angeles school superintendency this spring. Some say he’s destined to become Secretary of Education. “I don’t think that’s out of his reach,” says McCormick. “He knows people in those circles and they know him and they call on him.”
Crew says he doesn’t know what his future holds. He says the UW post is “a medium-term” job that offers an opportunity to “figure out what comes next.”
In the meantime, he considers his current position a “quintessential teaching moment” during which he can both share his knowledge and acquire more. “I intend to be a good student in these next several years,” he says.
Late last spring, Crew addressed a group of educators attending the UW’s Danforth Institute, a yearlong training program for principals-to-be. He told them about a visit he made as New York’s chancellor to a school in the Bedford Stuyvesant community.
During the visit, he paused to encourage a boy who was struggling with a math problem. “You stay at it,” he told him. “You’ll get it.”
Later, Crew encountered the boy again. He asked Crew who he was. He told him he was chancellor and was responsible for every school in the city. “Are you any good at it?” he asked. “Some days … some days not,” said Crew.
Replied the little boy, “You stay at it. You’ll get it.”
Some consider it a social obligation. Some might call it savvy politics. And others say it is a UW tradition going back to the founding of the institution. But all would agree that the University of Washington has sharpened its focus on K-12 education.
The hub of the effort is the Office for Educational Partnerships led by Vice Provost Louis Fox. In a 1999 report to the Board of Regents, Fox’s office identified five major initiatives—two that already existed and three at the starting gate—designed to support the process of K-12 reform. A sixth has since been added.
The initiatives match academic strengths of the University with specific public school needs, says Fox. Guided by advisory boards, the initiatives use the University’s resources to offer training, research and technical assistance to K-12 educators in partnership with the public school system, parents, community members and business leaders.
Fox’s report followed a series of strategic planning sessions by the regents centered on enhancing K-12 education. UW President Richard L. McCormick says there are several reasons why the University felt compelled to strengthen its support for public schools.
For one thing, the Legislature continually asks what the University of Washington is doing for K-12 schools, says McCormick. For another, supporting the public school system is a matter of “enlightened self-interest,” since the system produces most of the University’s students. Finally, says McCormick, a public research university such as the UW has both the ability and responsibility to help tackle problems facing society from crime to the environment to K-12 education.
Fox says various people and programs at the University have long supported K-12 education. Teaching certificates were among the first degrees the UW conferred. The College of Education was established in 1878 and has trained thousands of K-12 teachers who work in the state’s public schools.
Today’s efforts will bring an institutional commitment to new areas where the University believes it can have the greatest impact. Besides the Institute for K-12 Leadership, the public school initiatives consist of: