Q&A: Iowa City School Superintendent Stephen Murley

Last year, Iowa City Superintendent Steve Murley came from a school district in Wasau, WI, to replace departing Superintendent Lane Plugge. As he finished up his first year, Murley sat down with Iowa City Patch to discuss what he's learned in his first term as head of the Iowa City school district.

Iowa City Patch:  It's been about a year since you've started in Iowa City. What do you think you've learned from your experience here so far?

Steve Murley:  This community as a whole has a great commitment to public education. And certainly, given the national stage and where we're at right now, it's wonderful to see a community that is that invested in its public schools.

This support has been manifested in the feedback we've received. That feedback comes at board meetings, it comes via e-mail, it comes via phone calls, it comes with conversations on the street or at events.  Clearly it demonstrates a passion for the education of our children.

One of the reasons that I got into education is I really see it as an investment in the future. So to have that echoed by the community and recognize that we're really growing with the future of the community, the state and the country by the work we do with the kids, for me it's very heartening. That's been wonderfully reinforcing for me because I heard much of that as I came through the interview process and as I met people in the community. It's good to see that's not just something that you see as part of an interview process, but people here actually walk that walk.

Perhaps things that I have learned about the process  is that the historical component of where we've been here in the community casts a very long shadow. You always have to understand from whence you came in order to move forward, but particularly in this community and with some of the issues that we're dealing with, that historical context in some cases casts a larger shadow than one might otherwise expect.

Iowa City Patch: You talk about that long shadow. Is it hard to talk about all these problems all the time and also try to remind people that Iowa City has a good school district? How do you try to balance that out?

Murley: That's a wonderful point. There's a book by a guy named Jim Collins, prevalent in business circles, called Good to Great. One of the things he talks about, and it's one of the central tenets of the book, is that if you're good it can be very hard to become great because there's a sense of comfort, some might say complacency — satisfaction — in where you are right now, that makes it hard to choose to change. If you're substandard, or if you're clearly poor, there are often fewer hurdles to overcome to institute change in order to become great.

In a district like Iowa City, where you have very high achieving students under every metric that you can use to measure children's success, many people both inside and outside of the district look at that and say, "Not broken, why fix it?"

It can be difficult to talk about the next steps for public education. I'm part of an ongoing dialogue about this, and the debate we're having is reform versus transform. Much of that centers around the fact reform is about taking what we're doing now and making some small changes to it. Transform goes further and says, "Is what are we doing right now what we will need to be doing five, 10, 15 years from now?" If not, can reform get us there, or do we have to look at doing something that is in some cases radically different from what we're doing right now?

And that conversation again is very difficult to have in a community like Iowa City, particularly with the influence of the University of Iowa.  We have so many people who say that the next step for our children after matriculation is a four-year university. We have a prestigious, high-quality university right here in town. We have many people who work there. They understand what it takes to succeed in that environment. They know their children are getting the skills they need to succeed from our schools. So then they ask the question: "Why change?"

Part of this discussion that I'm having, whether it's inside the school district or outside with business leaders or up and down the corridor, is that I understand that the majority of what we're doing right now serves our children very well. However, our community demographics are changing. Is the model that we have in place appropriate for those who come to us who have a different perspective on education?

Perhaps not. Our scores show that, in particular, those students who are in our last quartile are struggling the most in our current system. And that students at the upper levels, whether they've been with us or are new, who may not be choosing college as a matriculation destination after high school, are also seeing their opportunities diminish over time. Are we serving them adequately?

And finally, I think the biggest global question you have to ask. A student that's born today in 2011 is going to graduate in the class of 2028-2029. Will a student going through the system that we have right now be prepared for whatever is next for them in the year 2028-2029 if we take what we're doing now and simply go through the same slow and natural reform progression that have we out there? Or, do we have to look at a transformational process? That's the dialogue that we need to be having in this community.

Iowa City Patch: So what I think you're  saying is that the schools are already good. It's just that when we talk about these issues, when people think of them as problems, they are in fact challenges that stand in the way of getting even better?

Murley: Right. I never look at them as problems. I like your word challenges, or I always call them opportunities. Handled well, they stimulate dialogue, whether it's about boundaries, demographics that we're dealing with at the elementary level, or at the secondary level where we'll talk about electives and programming through our community engagement process in the fall.

For example, this fall I would be hard pressed to believe that we won't hear about the role of elementary school foreign language. I know that is something that they're already working on in the Cedar Rapids school district and many school districts across the country are realizing that kids learn foreign languages better at the elementary level. I can foresee people asking us why we aren't doing the same thing in our school district.

At that point we get into discussion that we have a fixed set of resources, and it's not an allocation of resources that we're talking about in that case, but a reallocation of resources. In order to start doing something, we're going to have to stop doing something else. What we need to do is start that discussion with the community to see what they want us to add as part of the system and what then they want us to stop doing.

On Thursday, read the second in a three-part interview with Superintendent Murley's first year as head of Iowa City schools.