Inadequate coverage of Miami-Dade School Board-Rudy Crew saga (from Miami Herald)

Definitley some questions we should be thinking about as this chapter unfolds.
-Dr. Louie F. Rodriguez
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Miami Herald
Posted on Sun, Sep. 07, 2008
Inadequate coverage of Miami-Dade School Board-Rudy Crew saga
BY EDWARD SCHUMACHER-MATOS
No story is more important to you and me as readers of The Miami Herald than the state of our schools. In them lie not just the obvious future of our children, but the less obvious future of our local economy, our home values and our civic culture.
So the shocking fall of Miami-Dade schools superintendent Rudy Crew from being named National Superintendent of the Year by his peers to what even his backers say will be his likely firing or resignation would seem to be grist for crucial stories about just what is happening in the schools.
But those stories have gone missing. Since the saga devolved over the past 10 weeks from School Board grousing to racially tinged charges by Crew, who is African-American, of being ''lynched'' and ''treated like a dog,'' the coverage has been almost exclusively about political in-fighting, with mostly a ''he-said, she-said'' sort of false objectivity.
Manny Garcia, Senior Editor of News, said that The Herald has been planning for some time to do a more analytical step-back but that the daily rush of a fast-evolving story and the changes created by the recent staff cutbacks have interfered. The education editor took a recent buyout, and a new education editor, Heidi Carr, began last week.
''I don't want it to be an excuse,'' Garcia said. ``We have to deliver strong daily copy, but we need also to find the time to give the enterprise and context readers expect from us.''
As I write, an analytical story that Garcia says will ''look at benchmarks of how superintendents are normally measured across the country'' and examines the challenges that await the next superintendent is being prepared and will run elsewhere in the paper today. I have not seen the article, but I question whether even it will be enough.
[Editor's note: The article mentioned above, which was researched and reported over the past three weeks, appears today on Page 1A.]
The article also comes late. Some board members were up for reelection two weeks ago, which resulted in a balance of power shifting to Crew's critics. Whether better coverage would have changed the vote will never be known.
None of my criticism is meant to take sides. Crew often seems to be his own worst enemy. He has been strangely poor at board, media and community relations. His lapses have allowed critics to set the tone of the debate and make even mundane issues a referendum on his performance. This doesn't mean that The Miami Herald should allow itself to be played.
ISSUES THAT MATTER
Two real issues for readers, it seems to me, are whether Crew has been a good educator and a good manager.
On the first, the consensus seems to be that Crew has raised the educational quality of the schools. Yet, not one article over the past 10 weeks explored Crew's educational record. A review of the past six months finds several good features on individual schools and a wonderful back-to-school package. But there is little analytical coverage, and the one story that attempts this is a hatchet job. ''Zone initiative ineffective,'' said the June 27 headline about an internal report ''obtained'' by The Herald. The ''ineffectiveness'' concerned the first year of the new School Improvement Zone program. That year ended two years ago. The story offered almost nothing about the program's development since, making the report near worthless today.
Yet it was treated as a great revelation, critical of a signature Crew innovation. It even quoted Crew critic and board member Ana Rivas Logan saying of the entire program: ''According to this report, it was a total flop.'' I have no idea if the program today is a failure, but that was a dishonest quote about a report that dealt only with the first year. It never should have been allowed to stand alone, if even published.
Crew's management record in going over this and last year's budgets is the source of much criticism. This year's overrun, by my simple calculation from the confusing stories, is less than 1.5 percent. Is that major? Unprecedented? I don't know from The Herald's coverage, which never analyzes the budget.
I do know that news columnist Miriam Marquez was unfair when she blamed Crew for sloppiness because of an unjustified $10,000 moving expense by a school attorney. The executive in charge of a $5.5 billion budget should not be checking employee expense accounts.
One story by reporter Nirvi Shah at least gave an insightful measure by which to judge Crew. Shah compared the more-harmonious board and budget process in Broward County. There, new superintendent Jim Notter, according to Shah, is more solicitous of the board than Crew. He also began last year to make larger cutbacks in anticipation of state cuts.
The implications I derive from the coverage and reader letters is that Crew may have been more focused on pushing educational improvements, despite the new budget realities. ''We're at a crossroads here,'' board chairman Agustín Barrera says in a July 16 story by Kathleen McGrory that nicely lists a lot of the budget and political issues. ``We're being funded for basic education, and that's what we're going to have to provide.''
Wow. If that's true, where are the follow-up stories on the implications of what that means not just for schoolchildren, but for South Florida in a globally competitive information age? School Board members and state legislators can hide from confronting real issues, but The Miami Herald should not.
Another difficult budget issue readers deserved to know more about concerns withholding teacher raises and/or firing hundreds of teachers. What are the implications of Crew's whopping proposal of front-office cuts of 30 percent?
CRITICAL QUESTIONS
Board member Renier Díaz de la Portilla says in one story that Crew was responsible for ''a mistake classifying special-needs students that contributed to a $66 million overage in the 2007-08 budget.'' He says: ''I don't think taxpayers should continue to foot the bill for his incompetence and negligence.'' OK. But I as a reader want the impartial Herald to tell me what the truth is about this mysterious overage. Is this charge demagoguery, or did Crew make an egregious mistake?
The damage to Crew is done by leaving the charge standing and unchallenged.
Many letter writers and online comments say a Cuban-American vendetta is behind the attacks on Crew because of earlier alleged slights. Marquez persuasively reports in a column that the blame is exaggerated, and that Crew was at fault for not winning over those parts of the Cuban community opposed to him. Still, this sensitive issue and the role of Cuban talk radio deserved more reporting.
After Crew barely survived a vote last month on his tenure, reporter Matthew Pinzur brought some needed perspective to what at least Crew's weakened status means. Calling it a ''dark soap opera that has polarized the community and shoved educational issues off stage.'' Pinzur writes: ''The most vital question is whether the heady politics that produced Monday's 5-4 vote will color every future policy debate of Crew's tenure.'' It might be possible, others say, but Pinzur himself concludes: ``Navigating such narrow political waters can be exhaustingly time-consuming and require a level of compromise and tongue-biting that Crew has rarely shown.''
Now that is good analysis. Readers should have had more of that.
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