GothamSchools

Rudy Crew

Over at the Museum of Modern Art right now, philanthropist Eli Broad, Chancellor Klein, and hundreds of other education-oriented folks are gearing up to award the 2008 Broad Prize for Urban Education. Unlike last year, there’s no clear frontrunner, but my money’s not on Miami, nominated this year for the third time in a row.

The Miami-Dade County Public Schools have had a tumultuous 2008. This past spring, superintendent Rudy Crew, New York’s chancellor from 1995 to 1999, won the American Association of School Administrators’ National Superintendent of the Year award — and then was run out of town by an angry school board last month. Superintendent since May 2004, Crew helmed the system for all of its Broad Prize nods, awarded largely because Miami’s test scores gains have outpaced the rest of Florida’s. Is Miami’s new superintendent, who’s spent his entire career in the city’s schools, representing the system at today’s ceremony?