TH:How did you get interested in education as a career?
JB:I can't remember a time that I wasn't interested in education. I was the oldest of six children. We played school plenty of times. I don't recall a time that I wasn't the teacher. It's not because of family members involved in education. I'm really the first one in my family to have gone to college.

TH:What occupation did your parents have?
JB:My mother died when I was only 8. She was just 30 years old. She was a housewife. My dad was involved in a variety of occupations. He retired from Winnebago Corp. up in Forest City.

TH:So you grew up in the Forest City area?
JB:No, we actually lived with my grandmother. After my mother died, my youngest brother was 6 months old when she died and my grandmother took the six of us in. She was a widow. So we actually grew up in Ionia, Iowa. Town of about 300 people.

TH:Were you able to maintain contact with your father, then, during those years?
JB:We lost contact for a number of years, but got back in contact for a number of years before he died.

TH:You had a long-standing interest in education then. Do you have a particular teacher who maybe gave you that inspiration?
JB:Well, I actually attended the Catholic school in Ionia, St. Boniface Elementary. It only went through eighth grade and then I ended up going to New Hampton High. We were trained to be respectful of the nuns who taught in our school. It was always a big deal in town when the sisters would move back after the summer vacation. So, I always admired the work they did. I don't know that I could identify any one particular teacher at the elementary level. At the high school level, I sort of knew I was interested in teaching English and could be sort of an observant critic of the English teachers that I had. My senior English teacher was excellent. I probably admired her most as far as the kind of teacher I thought I might like to be.

TH:What was her name?
JB:Marilyn Woodruff. She was extremely knowledgeable about literature and an excellent teacher of writing. Those were areas that I was interested in pursuing, even though my guidance counselor suggested I major in a foreign language because there wouldn't be so many papers to correct.

TH:Take the easy route. Then you went to Northern Iowa and pretty much stayed the course, then?
JB:Stayed the course in English. Took foreign language, Spanish classes, but ended up one hour short of a minor so that I would never be assigned to teach in that area. But it's been very useful. I took Latin and Spanish in high school and Spanish in college and certainly it's an area... I've always said that after I master the piano, then I want to become bilingual, so that's my next learning goal. Not that I've mastered the piano, but I did take piano lessons when I turned age 50.

TH:So you just started recently?
JB:Yeah. I had to give it up this past year. I just couldn't squeeze in the practice time, and that's more important for adults than kids taking piano lessons. But I thoroughly enjoyed the lessons. It was a good learning experience.

TH:Did you go the recitals and all that?
JB:I only once had to play in the recital. When my daughter was a senior and in her senior recital, we did a duet. That was the only agreement I would make with the piano teacher. I said, "No, I'm too old for this pressure."

TH:After graduating from Northern Iowa, you taught for awhile?
JB:I taught high school English in Grundy Center. Really, it was a great experience. The school is small but there were enough students in the high school that there were three of us in the English department. So we got to collaborate and brainstorm. We had a good group of people there. That's where I met my wife, as well.

TH:OK!
JB:She came to Grundy Center and taught junior high English. In fact, our engagement was announced at an all-school assembly. So that was kind of fun.

TH:This assembly was called for some other purpose?
JB:Yes. It wasn't for this purpose. And we didn't make the announcement. The students chose to do that.

TH:But you knew about it?
JB:Oh, yeah.

TH:How is it that you came to Dubuque?
JB:We left Grundy Center so that I could go back to school. We resigned our positions and went to Iowa City. I was in the School of Library Science there. My wife taught in Washington, Iowa, during that time. Then, following a summer and full year in graduate school, I was looking for a library position and the timing was such that there was a job open at Hempstead. I also interviewed in Kansas and chose the Hempstead position and we've enjoyed it. We've lived in Dubuque since 1978 and it's been a great place to live. A great place to raise our kids, both of whom went through Irving, Table Mound, Washington, Senior High and had a wonderful experience. We just like the community itself. Beautiful.

TH:The last 15 years, then, you've held a variety of positions.
JB:Which all could be summarized doing district work in the area of curriculum. It so happens a turn around in the title changes. We did go through a series of superintendents and different organizational structures in that time. I started here when Howard Pigg was still the superintendent, followed by Diana Lam followed by Marv O'Hare and Joel Morris and Jane Petrick. So different superintendents choose to organize differently. But, essentially, since I've come to the district office, I've always worked in different areas of curriculum. I've probably worked with every area of responsibility, even briefly with mathematics, even though that's probably not a strength. But often at the district level we're concerned with the process and rely on the expertise of our teachers as we review curriculum and bring in folks from colleges to help us and consultants as necessary. It's been fun. I enjoy the variety in the work that I've done. Regarding teacher performance assessments:
JB: One of the things I think that the board is interested, and some teachers do on their own initiative and which our evaluation system does allow but not everyone takes advantage of, is information from surveys or feedback. Some of the high school teachers particularly have always had a procedure where they get feedback from their students about what they liked or didn't like about the teacher or the class. I think that we design more of that into the administrative evaluation system so that part of the requirement is some kind of survey. I certainly would want that to be part of my evaluation process as superintendent. I think I ought to model that even if others, by contract, don't have to do it. I, as superintendent, ought to have feedback given even to the board without it having to go to me so it can be done anonymously so people can say what they think.

TH:What do you say to critics, either in the district or even in the community, who say we've got all these expeditions and all these Expeditionary Learning experiences, but what we really need is to spend more time with reading and math and having those students learn those skills?
JB:From the very beginning, the very best learning expeditions started with the grade level expectations. And as I think about some of the quality learning expeditions that for example culminated in Fulton's recent video on ancient cultures. I mean, they start with our district level expectations and design into them, perhaps different ways of approaching that instruction, but nonetheless targeted at the same skills and concepts that we would be developing if it were a more traditional approach. So, I think over the years, we've done, the schools that have been working with the expeditionary learning model, have done a better job of sort of refining how those expeditions are designed to make sure that they're fully carrying their instructional weight. That they are not in fact just frills that are taking away time from instruction on the real stuff of school.

TH: Regarding No Child Left Behind: Do lawmakers and the president just not get it? Is there that much of a disconnect?
JB:I think we're feeling better now that Iowa's accountability plan has been approved by the federal government. I think across the state, we recognize the sanity of our own education department leaders and I think even our own legislators. The disconnect? I don't know well enough what's going on everywhere in the country that would cause our president and the federal legislators to believe that all of the elements they put in No Child Left Behind are really good. In Iowa, we're trying to make sense of it. I don't think we have schools in Iowa that need kind of the whipping boy model that is designed into some of the sanctions under No Child Left Behind. I guess we feel we can make it work in Iowa. I think we can make it work in Dubuque. We might have some schools that are identified as schools in need of assistance, as we have had. Audubon identified. But I think our Department of Education recognizes that this should not be perceived as a brand indicating inferiority. In fact, they're using the term School In Need of Assistance rather than School In Need of Improvement. Now, maybe you can argue that's just semantics, but in my mind, at Audubon, we have more people requesting open enrollment TO Audubon than we have requesting open enrollment OUT OF Audubon. We have strong teachers at Audubon. I think one of the accusations or one of the sanctions says, well, if a school doesn't get off this list, we have to consider reassigning the staff members who have caused the problem. It's like, OK, how would we? No. 1, maybe there are staff members - at any school - who aren't as strong in teaching math as the teacher next door. I think we continue to work with trying to elevate the skills of everyone, but to say that this school is low performing as a direct result of our having assigned poor teachers to the school just isn't true anywhere in the district. You hear that sometimes about some of the big cities where the least senior teachers end up in the lowest performing schools and that could perpetuate a cycle of low achievement if you have continual turnover. But I don't think we have any school in the district where the turnover rate is alarming. Fulton School. That's a school with some academic challenges, as an example, with a larger number of kids in the low performing category, both in reading and math. Yet, we have several Gold Star teachers at that school. We have teachers who have made true commitments over many years to teaching at Fulton and we can identify teachers on that staff who we know are leaders in math instruction and reading instruction and so forth. It's just going to be a matter of what makes sense for Iowa. And what makes sense for Dubuque. We'll report our results and if there are sanctions that face us, we'll face them together.

TH:You speak of evaluation of teachers and of administrators and some of the new guidelines. Is there a way for parents to have assurance that their students are getting good instruction from properly trained, properly evaluated teachers?
JB:Two parts to that question, I guess. By federal law, the No Child Left Behind Act, we have to report or make available upon inquiry at least, whether we have any staff who are not fully qualified. Now happily, I think 100 percent of our staff are certified in the areas where they're teaching. That's not true across the country and really that's the impetus for this requirement. Evaluation of teachers, at least, is part of the negotiated contract with Dubuque Education Association. By contract, the results of those evaluations are confidential. So you get into those kinds of issues. What can be appropriately shared? When we've had problems with a particular employee, and parents ask, "What are you going to do about this?," we have to say, "This has been part of the evaluation process, we're addressing this through our internal procedures, we're not allowed to share with you what's in the improvement plan." I guess that is hard for people from outside the district. We can't always share that information.

TH:I realize that you can't get into specifics, but are there teachers in the district who are not renewed from one year to the next because of performance?
JB:Yes. Sometimes, negotiations occur that allow resignations rather than firing. But we believe it's our job to try to ensure that they (teachers) get the support they need in order to be successful. So during that probationary period they have our mentoring program, which is recognized nationally. It's sort of a supportive side to mentoring and a supervision side provided by the principals. We don't have many such situations, but we have some.

TH:We recently congratulated that Class of 2003, and it won't be too long before members of the Class of 2003 will be sending their children to Dubuque Community Schools. What do you think Dubuque Community Schools will be like when the offspring of the Class of 2003 are completing their public school education here?
JB:I guess, first of all again, the realist in me is aware that schools are a very slow-changing institution. To predict huge changes is probably going to be unrealistic. But I do have some hopes for how we might look different by the time the children of our present graduates come to school. No. 1, I hope our elementary schools are more of a full-service school model. That we have programs that really support kids from birth through the time they might officially enter as students we would count as our enrollment. We realize the importance of parent education and I think that's going to continue to be critical. That if we don't have parent involvement and parent support and parents being active as the first teachers of their children, any hopes we have for significant changes in the student achievement just aren't going to be met. And I would hope those classrooms would continue to be child-centered classrooms. What we've recognized for a number of years as qualities of excellent early childhood programs don't stop at the end of second grade, but we have similarly student-focused classrooms and engaging classrooms and opportunities for kids even at that young age to be out in the community where appropriate. That the school isn't just bounded by the four walls.