State. He became superintendent of Miami-Dade County Public Schools (M-DCPS), the nation's fourth-largest school district, on July 1, 2004, following a nationwide search.

Dr. Crew serves on numerous boards, including the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, the New York Philharmonic, and the Washington Association of Black School Educators. He is the recipient of many prestigious awards, including the NAACP Educational Leadership Award, the Arthur Ashe Leadership Award, and the Association of California School Administrators Administrator of the Year Award.

During his tenure at M-DCPS, Dr. Crew has implemented a variety of initiatives to eliminate low-performing schools and increase academic achievement for all students, including the Scorecard system, Reading in Progress partnership, and Parent Academy.

Beyond the Book recently had the honor of speaking with Dr. Crew about his vision for education, his philosophy on leadership, and the important initiatives he's established in his district.

BTB: As a veteran educator who has served as a teacher, administrator, college professor, and coordinator of special programs and staff development, can you please describe how you how you became an educational leader?

RC: My leadership work in a formal sense began when I finished graduate school at the University of Massachusetts, and served as the coordinator of a magnet school program in Boston. It was during the early days of desegregation, and magnet schools were simply a concept. My role was to build a series of magnet schools that would attract students from around the city into schools that were historically all Black. This work began to open up my eyes to what it meant to create and design, and I believe that's one of the real skills of a leader: the skill of invention—to carve something that doesn't yet exist. And that skill carried through as I then took on other leadership roles in California, Boston, New York City, and finally, Miami.

All of these assignments have brought with them an intense desire to redesign and rethink problems in such a way as to get my hands around the solutions.

BTB: Is that your definition of leadership—the ability to rethink a problem and design a solution?

RC: To me, leadership ultimately means finding new frameworks within which you can see a problem as solvable. There are very few problems that are instantly solvable. Most of the larger issues of public education are those that require a new architecture—a new framework and new way of designing an answer. To a large degree, one is better suited to think like an artist, as a leader, than to think in tactical terms. The work is so incredibly unscripted that you need an artistic framework within which to examine a problem so that it can be solved.

BTB: In discussing new frameworks, your concept of the Parent Academy, which you successfully implemented in M-DCPS, comes to mind. Can you elaborate on what you believe to be the role of the parent?

RC: There's never been a dispute about the value that parents add to children's lives. All you have to do is look back on your own life and find the significant adult—whether it's your parent, grandparent, or someone else—who's provided for you the confidence to try something new or the reward for having done it to the best of your ability. Whether or not you got an A isn't the issue; the issue is that you were a game learner and were willing to try something at a much higher level than perhaps you had done before.

I think the role of parents hasn't really been widely considered by schools. Clearly, parents provide us with their children, and they can be a very supportive value-add at home. The community at-large offers the potential for giving kids all the right signals about the value of education—about the need to feel and embrace the notion of new knowledge. All of that is really important, but the unfortunate part is that most of the conversation is about parents supplying us with their children. They simply provide us with the basis to fill our classrooms.

My hope, ultimately, is that we can entice parents to be more than that. And, in many communities, we're very successful because parents are automatically shifting to a much higher role. They are becoming "demand-parents"—parents who basically provide us with their intellectual, emotional, and financial cache because they are invested in the enterprise of public education, rather than just in their child's classroom or teacher. When parents make that investment, it shifts them from supply to demand. Consequently, they attend our board meetings, visit our schools, and sit in our classrooms. They bring that value-add into those domains as well.

We have an enormous opportunity through the Parent Academy to convert many more of our parents from "supply-parents" to "demand-parents." The Parent Academy offers parents the opportunity to take various classes that focus on life and career skills, and most importantly, on how to help their children succeed.

We have the potential to transform thousands of parents, across urban America particularly, who heretofore have understood their role as simply getting their kids get to school on time to now thinking of themselves as something more. These parents are becoming more intellectual—facility-wise, financially, and culturally—and are adding value to the enterprise of public education. As a result, we can start to see a change in the product of our schools.

Think about affluent communities that consider schooling to be a right and privilege versus communities that are too worried and afraid, or are too disenfranchised, to even take one step into a school parking lot or through a school door. These are communities that ultimately need to become more demanding. They need to push us on issuing a product that works for them, like offering a high level of instruction that doesn't have a revolving door, and offering the same high-quality education taught with the same set of expectations as given to others. But if these communities don't do that and don't have any footprint that they lay into the school, then they lose out. They lose out as consumers and as parents overall. The Parent Academy was really an innovation that was sparked by this notion of shifting parent roles from supply to demand. It is economic theory, rather than educational theory.

We are living at a time when industries are providing new and different products. In fact, what most of the best ones are doing is responding to demand. That's what public schools have to do. They have to lead demand—not simply respond to supply. The whole idea behind No Child Left Behind is really sort of wrong. It's not that the bill itself is bad, but that the concept should be to advance all children, rather than to leave no child behind. Leaving no one behind is sort of a minimalist approach, a meager attempt to make sure that we don't forget someone. I would rather say, "We are never going to forget someone." So the question becomes, "How do we start connecting the dots much differently than we've done in the past ten to twenty years."

BTB: You have a forthcoming book about this very topic. Is it a culmination of your twenty-five years in education, and does it address your approach to the transformation of education?

RC: The title is Only Connect, appropriately befitting the notion of connecting the dots. It's not a typical education book, but rather is intended to show the tremendous value in the communities that we oftentimes look past—the communities that don't know what to say or how to say it, or believe that they can provide any value. But I believe they can provide value. I certainly think of my own father, who is reflected in this book, and who demanded more of me and of schools in general. The truth is that if we want to advance all children, there are some things in America, regardless of socioeconomic factors, we have to do as a nation. This book is about what the nation could do, what the footprint of the entire nation could be—how big, how wide, how deep an impression it could make—if we really tried to advance literacy and learning at a much higher level to become more globally competitive.

There are many people over the past few years that have addressed global competition from one aspect or another—from professional development to more money, to better teachers, to smaller class size. There have been a lot of studies and research, and people have written voluminously about each one of those things. This book basically brings together all of those aspects, adjoining them to one another, because a nation that wants to be globally competitive is going to have to connect these dots. The word "connect" is both symbolic and operational. It's about all of the experiences that I've had as a parent, a teacher, and a principal, and as a superintendent who has run two of the largest school systems in the nation. I know what all the dots are, now let's begin the discussion on how to connect them.

BTB: Can you share your perspective on what it would take for American cities—those similar in size, magnitude, and complexity of Miami-Dade County or New York City—to raise their standards to compete on a global level educationally?

RC: I honestly feel American cities have not had a conversation about their global relationship for a very long time. More particularly, they have not had that conversation in relation to schools and schooling, and I think it's about time to open the dialogue.

In my book, I argue that we, as a nation, need to create a national teachers salary. We have to value teachers and teaching in a way that takes all of the griping and metal-on-metal, nail-biting conversations out of it. We have been fighting in the context of union-management relationships, and we've been fighting about teachers' salaries since I've been in the business. We argue about it as though there is something innately wrong with a teacher who makes forty, sixty, or eighty thousand dollars per year. The truth of the matter is that, globally, there are many teachers that make more than that, but these salaries are set by ministries of education in other countries. It is the country's value of teaching that is expressed in that salary.

In America, we need to take teachers' salaries as a given—it's a price of democracy and of having a literate nation. In many other countries where public education is not funded, the rural communities of those countries are still struggling for literacy. India, for example, is struggling to create a literacy bandwidth that goes outside the elite. The truth is, in America, we have figured out how to go wide, but now we're arguing—as we have for the past two or three decades—with unions. In fact, it's exactly the wrong place to spend our energy. America needs a competitive salary for teachers so that we get strong, bright, and talented people coming into this profession. It's of little wonder to me that we have such a dearth of new people entering the profession. Much of it has to do with the fact that the pay is so little and varies so markedly throughout the country. Consequently, some say, "It's just not worth my time. I could do something better and bigger and more lucrative with my life than teach." Imagine how that could change if the salary were nationalized.

BTB: Aside from teachers' salary, are there other areas of education that need to be transformed in order for us to compete more globally?

We need to start developing international standards—a set of standards that help our children see that there are things they can do beyond reading, writing, and math. Those disciplines are absolutely core, but there are other skills that are as important to our global competitiveness. For example, there are the skills of occupational preparation. Our kids need to be able to show they're certified to work when they finish high school; they need proof that they actually did something in school that enables them to work for BMW or whatever venture they choose to pursue.

We also need to teach kids a sense of civic literacy, which is the idea that you belong to a team—that your work is not your own and you're a part of a larger body of humanity for which there are rules of engagement on how you conduct yourself. For example, many corporations coming into Miami are looking for people who can work as a team. To do this requires a sense of civic understanding and requires you to participate as a member of a democratic society. But how do you learn those things, and where do you learn them? And do we, in education, grade them? We want children to be in cooperative learning groups, but we are reluctant to grade them on their ability to be cooperative. I believe global standards have to get into this domain of civic literacy as well.

For me, the last aspect is personal adequacy—the idea that you have an enormous engine called your brain, and it enables you to make moral decisions and judgments. It also enables you to make excuses or develop solutions. Young people who are moving toward a successful, engaged, and productive life are those who have a high emotional quotient (EQ) as well as a high IQ. They understand how to say, "I'm sorry" and "Thank you"—how to exchange social graces that are befitting the moment. They understand there is a time and a place for everything. For example, they understand that sometimes it's not appropriate to wear sagging pants and a baseball cap. There are times when it is appropriate, but children need to be able to distinguish one from the other.

Currently, children are struggling with knowing what the ego limits are for their lives—where the walls start and end. They're asking adults for help, and they want schools to give them the greater definition of where those walls really are. If young people don't see the limits, I guarantee you that they will just push faster and farther. They'll use language that's inappropriate and dress in ways that are inappropriate. They'll do what they feel like doing because no one gave them any counsel to the contrary.

It's time for us to think about schooling beyond academic standards and to be really clear about what those new set of standards should be. America would say there is a core body of knowledge that American kids need to know. We aren't ever going to sacrifice our democracy, literacy, and core being as a nation with the absence of standardized skills as a regular part of high school and middle school education. However to compete globally, I believe there has to be a set of national academic standards in science, mathematics, reading and writing, the arts, and social studies. These five areas are absolutely part and parcel of a twenty-first century academic literacy. And there is now such a variation in these areas as to suggest that there are no national standards. Florida does them differently from New York, which does them differently from Illinois, and so on. The truth of the matter is that global competition doesn't mean everybody is doing the same thing at the same time. It means that a larger number of people know these core skills at a high level. Right now, we're a nation that has been struggling more and more with dropouts and kids who don't have these standards. Even Jay Leno is poking fun at our nation's lack of these standards. On the Tonight Show, during his "Jaywalking" segments, he asks people on the street questions like, "Who is the father of our country?" or "What countries were involved in World War II?" and no one can answer correctly. Consider the number of people who have recently immigrated to this country who can answer those questions in a heartbeat. Now is the time for us to nationalize education, which is not the same as federalizing it. I believe we need to nationalize a curriculum in those five areas, so that we can begin to get back some of the skill sets necessary to sustain, support, and build an "intelligence" of our nation.

In the continuation of this interview, Dr. Crew will discuss his approach to educational issues and problem solving.