THE two Rudys shook hands.
And from there, things pretty much went nowhere.
In their first face-to-face meeting since Rudy Crew whined to all his little friends that Rudy Giuliani was mean to him, the leader of the city’s largest school system arrived without his homework.
That is, it was business as usual for Rudy Clueless, the highest-paid schools chief in creation.
Yesterday’s meeting between the mayor and the schools chancellor was designed as a forum for the estranged leaders to hash out substantive improvements for the city’s troubled schools.
There were no fireworks. No barbs. No blowups or personal insults. In fact, last week’s famous falling-out between the Rudys was not even mentioned during the 90-minute meeting.
But sources familiar with the sit-down tell me Crew and his crew arrived at the table without a solid plan for speeding up academic reforms.
Worse, Crew and deputies Harry Spence and Judy Rizzo didn’t have a grasp on how much money they have to work with to build new schools or repair crumbling ones – or even which schools are first in line for fixing.
“The chancellor’s staff kept fumbling with numbers,” said a source familiar with the meeting.
“The mayor asked a lot of questions and pushed vigorously. But they were not prepared.”
Did anything productive come out of the meeting?
“Well, the fact that they met is an improvement,” said another source.
Lately, Rudy Crew’s escalating public temper tantrums have successfully distracted attention from the Board of Education’s lack of a plan to improve city schools.
A quick recap: Last March, Giuliani suggested that some poor children be given access to private educations through a voucher plan. Rudy Crew threatened to quit.
He didn’t.
Then last week, the chancellor took it personally when Giuliani suggested dismantling the useless Board of Ed. The $250,000-a-year Crew took the bizarre step of faxing off a letter across the city, moaning about Giuliani’s “rhetoric of destruction.”
Yesterday, though, the subject at hand had nothing to do with Board of Ed politics, and everything to do with the kids. And for that kind of discussion, Crew was clearly out of his element.
The topics on the table were:
1. A quick end to social promotions – the practice of pushing kids from grade to grade, even when they can’t do the work. And,
2. Capital budget – building and fixing schools.
My source reports: “In June of 2000, the chancellor wants to begin raising standards, to begin to end social promotion.
“The mayor was not presented with a complete plan, rather the beginning of a plan.”
Crew said it would cost more to hold kids back a grade. The mayor countered that “if the board comes up with a real plan to end social promotion, then funding could be made available.”
“The longer we wait, the worse the problem will get.”
On the subject of school buildings, “there was a real lack of focus on how much money there is in the budget” by Crew’s people.
“Choices have to be made, so parents and teachers know how many schools will be built, and with what money. They were talking about maybe money, hypothetical money, or if-we’re-lucky-we’ll-get-it-from-the-state money.”
Mayoral adviser Tony Coles, who attended the meeting, told me Giuliani “pushed and prodded, trying to get more progress on social promotion and capital budget, to make the hard decisions.”
No one from Crew’s office returned my calls.
Is Crew up to the job?
This was Rudy Crew two years ago: “We don’t have a lot of time to fix the public schools … before the public gets fed up and begins to replace it with something else.”
This is Rudy Crew today: “Waaaaaaaa!!!!”
For our money, we need someone who does his homework.
Rudy Clueless ain’t it.