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Jack Bierwirth's four years in Portland haven't been much fun. Last week he announced he's stepping down as schools superintendent to take the top post at Outward Bound. |
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Photo: Michael Parrish |
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Bierwirth was one of 100 applicants in 1992 to replace Matthew Prophet, who ran Portland Public Schools for 10 years.
Portland Public Schools enrollment has climbed from 56,000 to 58,000 since Bierwirth arrived, while the budget has shrunk by $34 million.
Portland schools lag behind the state average in every category of the 1997 statewide assessments except two: 5th- and 8th-grade math.
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If Portland Public Schools superintendent Jack Bierwirth is leaving Portland out of frustration, he's not saying so. When we walked into Bierwirth's office for a Monday morning interview, we didn't expect him to start trashing the legislators, lobbyists and political opponents who have made his six-year stay such a challenge. That would have been out of character. Then again, we didn't expect Mr. Rogers reads I'm Okay, You're Okay, either. This is, after all, the Jack Bierwirth who dumped an entire school staff earlier this year and who didn't mind telling the governor he wasn't doing enough for schools. But throughout a nearly two-hour question-and-answer session, Bierwirth resisted all temptation to put names or faces on what he sees as the obstacles to stable school funding and a successful school-reform effort. We prepped for the interview by talking to a couple of Bierwirth's personal friends and several colleagues. "Don't buy the rap in The Oregonian, about what a great opportunity Outward Bound is," said one Bierwirth friend. "It's a great opportunity, but he's been looking for six months. He's burned out." Bierwirth does acknowledge that he's frustrated. Yet in spite of his assertion that Portland schools have deteriorated after years of budget cuts, Bierwirth wouldn't point fingers or name names. Instead, he steered all inquiries toward the big picture. "I don't want to give people the easy answers--the seven-second soundbite that appeals to people's prejudices or preconceptions," he told us. "It's really easy in the midst of your own frustration to let that soundbite become your answer. I've forced myself not to do that." Below are excerpts from our interview. WW: Did you realize when you came here how much of a political animal you'd have to be, that you'd have to be down in Salem begging for cash? Jack Bierwirth: No. But then again nobody else did either. I made a calculated decision after I got here that I really needed to spend a lot of time on political and financial stuff. But I wasn't alone in that. A lot of parents and others who used to spend a lot of time helping in libraries, classrooms and site councils made similar decisions. We knew that if we spent all of our time in the schools, and things fell apart, we wouldn't have spent the time where we needed to. I get a sense that it's not something you relish. I haven't enjoyed that aspect of the job. I like being in schools, seeing what teachers do, listening to them. I can think of no time period in my career where I've spent less time doing that. Do you feel that you had enough allies in Salem? Everybody was down there talking about education, but when you actually went down there, did you have the help you needed from people like Vera Katz, Bev Stein, Gov. Kitzhaber? Yes and no. Yes in the sense that there were large numbers of people who were concerned, but no in the sense that all of us together were unable to do much more than arrest the further decline. There is no long-term plan that leads into the next session of the Legislature. If the ultimate test is whether it produces the results we need it to produce, we're not there yet. What more could you have done to bring those people together? Let's grade your performance. The greatest mistake I made stems from making assumptions about what people were thinking. For example? The sales tax. Large numbers of people assumed that because the schools were in trouble and headed into worse circumstances, that would be enough to change people's mind about a sales tax. That was a really bad assumption. We also tended to act as if because we were "right" we would win. But that...is an arrogant assumption. To a degree we still tend to act that way, collectively. I'd say that if we failed, it was in two areas: We made assumptions we had no right to make, and we failed to get out in front of issues. We've tended to react. Do you feel the business community has done everything it could to help, and I'm referring specifically here to the kicker and local opposition to the business income tax? I don't think anyone has done everything they can. The situation is more complex. The business community has benefited enormously from Measure 5, but the business community also fought Measure 5, they fought Measure 47, and they supported the sales tax. In the earlier years when a few people were walking the halls saying serious problems were coming, many of those were people in the business community, and I remember that. The Portland Chamber was very active down there. How's your relationship with the governor, the mayor and the Let's take the mayor. She has a strong personality. I have a strong personality. We are not about to pull punches over the things we really care about. The press loves to have disagreements, and lots of people love to go underground passing on the latest stuff. But what people miss is what actually happens. They don't seem to understand that people can disagree and yet work together. I've had my frustrations with her. She's had them with me. Neither of us would have wanted the other to be someone who acquiesced to something the other wanted. The governor? I like him a lot. I think it's a shame that circumstances put us in a position where I had to advocate hard for things that put him in an awkward position. As he said a number of times publicly, I had a job to do and I've gone about doing it. Before coming here, we asked some of your friends what they wanted to know about you. They said to cut through the niceties about what a great opportunity Outward Bound is and get to the heart of your frustrations here. Do you mind talking to us on a personal level? I've been very personal all the time I've been here. I don't like to talk about certain aspects of my family life, because they have a right to privacy. On the other hand, I've been very open about my concerns for my own children, which parallel my concerns for the other 58,000 [in Portland Public Schools]. For four years I could honestly say that, despite all the cuts, what we provided was, by and large, as good or better than what was there prior to Measure 5 because of what teachers and parents had done to mitigate the effects. Since September 1996, I have no longer said that. Why not? Class sizes have risen, programs have either been cut or eliminated. We were no longer providing a complete education and in many ways, what we were offering had deteriorated. We were swimming upstream, and swimming hard, but getting carried downstream. Having said that, this is indeed a wonderful place. This is the right time and place to be in American education. It is very exciting to be a part of that. No other job but something like Outward Bound could have enticed me out of it. Your relationship with the teachers union has been very strained. What's behind that? The labor situation in this state reminds me of the automobile industry in the early 1980s. We're stuck in a rut that's out of date. I don't think this is a situation where there's a handful of important people or organizations at fault. It may sound trite, but we're all at fault. We're not making the changes that need to be made. I've heard criticism aimed at you by people in the business community for "managing to the precipice," that had you made cuts earlier, you wouldn't have faced the devastating cuts you ultimately had to make. I've heard that criticism before. There's just no reality to support it. One thing we did do, and I have no qualms about it whatsoever, we made the cuts as far away from children as possible, and we tried to make them as smoothly as possible. Somebody who thinks we didn't make the cuts early was someone who missed what we did. Do you feel you've been treated fairly by the media? Yes. But I think there's too much media in town with not enough to do. The bridge closure is a perfect example of that. How you can spend 20 minutes on a nightly news program talking about a bridge closure is beyond me. Here we are at the north end of the bridge, here we are at the south end of the bridge, here we are in the middle of the bridge, here we are five miles south of town, here we are with the engineer. It wasn't 20 minutes worth of news. But when you have the capacity and don't have the issue, you fill it up. Do you feel like the coverage of your decision at Humboldt was fair, or was it sensationalized? Both. Did you realize it would set off the fire storm it did? No. I probably should have. It was a much simpler decision than it probably seems. We believed that we needed to do something to turn the situation around, and fast. A lot of effort had gone into trying to turn it around without significant results. Clearly the achievement of the students there wasn't acceptable, and hadn't been for a long time. Was it a shot across the bow to wake up other schools? It has become that, but didn't start that way. The way that was reported made it seem like we had never stepped into a building and made significant changes prior to that. That's incorrect. While we had never gone that far, there have been buildings where we've moved out principals and teachers. We went further than ever before, but it was sensationalized in the sense that you'd think nothing even close to that had ever happened before. The reporting was fair in that the facts of what we were doing there were fairly accurate. But you'd think from some of the questions that we'd gone from nothing to everything. Can you share your views of Portland and Oregon with us? There's an Oregon culture. It's more unique and special than many people here realize. The shame of that is that some of those things are in danger of being lost because we aren't fighting hard enough to keep them--the schools, the environment, the livability. There's an assumption that because Oregon is different, it will be different forever, that it's a natural state. I don't think it's a natural state. I think it's different because people made it that way. Portland could become like any other American city unless people work to keep it. There's nothing that guarantees Oregon will remain special. |
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