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What did Brownsville, Tex., honored yesterday with the Broad Prize and earlier this year with the CUBE Award for School Board Excellence, do to earn these awards?

It cut class size and built more schools, among other changes, according to articles in CUBE’s Urban Advocate newsletter and US News & World Report.

“Curriculum and instruction has been the number one focus of every board member,” says Enrique Escobedo, president of the Brownsville Independent School District Board of Education. “We fill our needs first—the needs drive the budget.”

Brownsville stopped asking Texas for exemptions from class size rules in elementary schools, and instead upped teacher recruitment and retention measures until all classes met the state’s 22-student mandate for kindergarten through grade 4.

Teachers in Brownsville make a starting salary of $39,000, only a few thousand dollars less than new teachers in New York, though the cost of living in Brownsville is much lower. (Salaries in New York are much higher at the top of the scale, though.)

Despite high levels of poverty, the Brownsville community has strongly supported the schools, even approving a $135-million bond to finance school construction and renovation. School board members attribute this support to regular outreach through community meetings, citizen oversight of spending, and transparency about school finances, Urban Advocate reports.

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(L-R) Tom Otterness in the subway; the Broad Prize; at Manhattan's PS 20

In the 14th Street A/C/E subway station this morning, we took a look at the brass figures scattered over benches and under staircases and thought: Did the MTA, not Brownsville, win the Broad Prize?

Those statues, installed in the station in 2004, were designed by Brooklyn-based artist Tom Otterness, who also created the trophy that Broad Prize-winning school districts take home. Otterness’s work can also be found outside PS 234 in Tribeca and, since last year, at PS 20 on the Lower East Side. Perhaps his public education-oriented art is penance for his earliest work, which included shooting a dog on film; Otterness apologized for that project earlier this year.

During lunch at the Broad reception this afternoon, Miami superintendent Anthony Carvalho did take the podium on behalf of his district, and the awkwardness between him and his predecessor, Rudy Crew, continued, our source reports.

Carvalho, who our source notes spoke suavely and has a full head of hair, praised his district’s (recently dismantled) School Improvement Zone, a group of troubled schools where teachers work longer hours for more money, and Parent Academy, which trains parents to become involved in the schools. Rudy Crew, who was seated nearby, launched both initiatives. Carvalho didn’t mention him at all.

To answer my earlier question, Rudy Crew did in fact represent Miami during the discussion about urban school leadership that preceded the Broad Prize announcement this morning, according to our source at the event. His successor as Miami’s superintendent sat in the audience and watched, probably somewhat uncomfortably.

But freshly confirmed Miami-Dade superintendent Alberto Carvalho should try to enjoy his moment out of the spotlight: Since he was given Crew’s job in September, Carvalho has been under fire for having an improper relationship with a reporter on the schools beat and for the opaque process by which he was selected. Today, he’s enjoying an awards ceremony and catered lunch in MoMA’s picturesque statue garden, but tomorrow, he’ll have to face his critics once again.

Brownsville, Tex., will succeed New York City as the winner of the Broad Prize for Urban Education, the Broad Foundation just announced at an award ceremony at MoMA studded with stars of the education world.

The Brownsville Independent School District has nearly 50,000 students, 94 percent of them qualifying for free or reduced-price lunch. According to the Broad Foundation, BISD has outperformed other Texas districts that have a similar proportion of poor and immigrant student, closed the achievement gap between its Hispanic students and Texas’s white students, and implemented “strong district-wide policies and practices” in administration and finances.

But here’s ammunition for Broad Prize critics: Judging from the speed with which it had news of the prize on its homepage — beating out the Broad Foundation’s own online update — BISD also has a well-oiled public relations machine.

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?

Tomorrow we’ll know who has taken home the 2008 Broad Prize for Urban Education, awarded each year to the school district the Broad Foundation considers the nation’s “most improved.”

But chances are the award won’t put to rest questions about whether the foundation really picks the best districts. The official story is that a blue-ribbon panel consults not only school leaders but parents and teachers and reams of test score data. The panelists even said last year they do random school visits in the nominated districts.

But is the award given purely based on merit, or for “politics and PR,” as Leonie Haimson at NYC Public School Parents wonders? Every year the winning district has its detractors. And there are sometimes ties between the winning districts and the foundation that predate their awards. The city DOE received millions of Broad Foundation dollars well before it finally got its prize last year.

One thing we do know: the winning district had better have someone on hand to do some heavy lifting — the prize sitting across from Chancellor Klein’s desk weighs a ton.