Ryan Wise, director of the Iowa Department of Education, visited Perry Friday and toured the district’s schools under the guidance of Lynn Ubben, superintendent of the Perry Community School District.
Ubben first took Wise and Nicole Proesch, the education department’s legal counsel, to the Perry High School and then the Perry Middle School, wrapping up at the Perry Elementary School in the afternoon. They met the principals and visited several classrooms at each school, observing the lessons and the learning.
Wise, who was appointed by Gov. Terry Branstad to the education department’s top spot in 2015, has five years’ worth of experience as a classroom teacher, so he knows public schools at ground level.
“This is the 85th district I’ve visited,” Wise said, “and I’ve been the director for about a year and a half.”
At that rate, he will soon rival Sen. Chuck Grassley’s 99-county tours.
“But I’ve got 333 instead of 99,” Wise said, “so it’s going to take me a little bit longer than a couple of years. But it’s a huge part of my job because it’s easy when you’re in a policy-implementation focus to do it at a distance from schools. To me, I’ve got to be in schools every week to see, okay, how’s this actually working for the kids?”
Ubben said she invited Wise last fall to put Perry on his visitation schedule. On Friday he was able to visit with secondary instructional coaches at the Perry Middle School and observe the first year of Perry’s Teacher Leadership and Compensation program, Branstad’s initiative to provide leadership options for teachers.
“Our high school facility is not only full of great kids,” Ubben said, “but it has historical displays unique to Perry.” She said Wise also observed the early literacy and math instruction at the Perry Elementary School.
The Iowa Senate on Thursday approved a 1.1 percent increase in state financial aid to school districts for the 2017-2018 academic year. Critics call the funding proposal stingy and an insult to Iowa’s public school students and families, but Wise steers clear of politics.
“From the department perspective,” Wise said, “our focus is really on policy implementation, so we don’t get heavily in the recommendations for the school finances side, though we know that it’s critically important to schools. We’re really trying to say, ‘Here are the policies. How do we help interpret them and be good partners for schools as they implement them in their classrooms?’ That’s the approach our superintendents and our schools take as well.”
Not all superintendents, administrators and faculty members reserve their financial recommendations. The Senate bill passed this week was actively opposed by education groups such as the Iowa Association of School Boards, the Iowa State Education Association, School Administrators of Iowa, Rural School Advocates of Iowa and the Urban Education Network of Iowa.
The subject of school choice is popular now, and calls for school voucher programs have grown louder with the nomination of Betsy DeVos as U.S. Secretary of Education. Critics of voucher programs claim they divert taxpayer funds from already impoverished public schools. Wise again distinguishes between the formulation and implementation of policies.
“Those are good examples of political and policy decisions that our lawmakers and our governor are working through right now,” he said. “Again, our focus at the department will be on what actually happens in school, so how do we ensure things like early literacy and equitable and consistent access to current technical education, and strong teacher leadership are built and focused on, so really our focus is more on those programmatic pieces that are happening in schools, and we’ll let the policy makers and decision makers hash that out in Des Moines.”
Wise has been with the Iowa Department of Education since 2013. He earned his bachelor’s degree from Creighton University, a master’s in public administration from the University of Nebraska Omaha and a doctorate in education leadership from Harvard University.
He was the executive director of Teach for America in South Dakota from 2003-2008, where he worked with both public and Bureau of Indian Affairs grant schools on the Pine Ridge and Rosebud Reservations to improve educational opportunities.
His first five years in the field were spent teaching high school history at Omaha Central High School in Omaha, Neb., and at Rosa Fort High School in Tunica, Miss.
