The answer to the question “What’s wrong with Portland Public Schools?” often comes back the same: It’s a system without systems.
In the administrative hub for Oregon’s largest school district, employees don’t know what they’re responsible for and subsequently aren’t held accountable. Multiple departments can unknowingly work on the same task. Employees who know what they’re doing frequently end up quitting and are hard to replace.
Into that mess walked Bob McKean, 70, a veteran school administrator and former superintendent, lured out of retirement by a professional challenge bigger than any he’d faced before.
Given the school district reins for a year as temporary leader, he has remade key aspects of the school district’s top ranks – eliminating one of three assistant superintendent positions, cutting the superintendent’s direct reports nearly in half, helping staff say “not now” to some assignments on their plate. He has made it clear, through structure and through action, that the superintendent’s main priority is the educational side of district operations.
It’s somewhat surprising that the school board has allowed McKean, as a temporary hire, the freedom to make such significant change. Board members struggle to agree among themselves on district issues both large and small, which has caused tensions between board members and between the board and McKean.
Both school board vice chair Amy Kohnstamm and board member Paul Anthony, who often disagree, are supportive of McKean’s efforts to make structural change. Anthony just wishes there were more of it.
A dramatic rewrite of authority and lines of accountability at the top of Oregon’s largest school district has been a long time coming.
Outside auditors in 2005, 2013 and again in 2016 warned of chaos in central office, but concerns weren’t taken seriously until scandal hit. Fixing the confusion became a call to action after a crisis over lead in drinking water laid bare just how harmful bureaucratic bungling could be. Years of dodging and inaction by bureaucrats had left children and employees in virtually every school exposed to drink dangerously high levels of toxic lead.
The controversy ousted longtime Superintendent Carole Smith, casting a harsh lens on her ability to manage, even from those who held her legacy as a leader in high esteem.
What’s followed is a painful and public transition that’s been entrusted to a man with literal experience jumping into fires. McKean, a former superintendent of the mid-sized Centennial school district and a trained wildfire fighter, came out of retirement to work a year as Portland’s interim superintendent.
McKean doesn’t like the obvious comparison of his years as a summer vacation smokejumper to the highly fraught interim gig in which he’s found himself. But he admits that experience informs his management style as a “systems person.”
In a nerdy sort of way, McKean is passionate about his job and the people he works with at Portland Public Schools. But he is careful to state that his enthusiasm isn’t a promise and having hope isn’t a guarantee. Like any first responder, he isn’t going to say everything will be OK before it actually is OK.
So five months in, what’s the guy who loves systems done to the district notorious for lacking them? He’s begun to make changes, starting at the top.
He eliminated an entire department: the office of early learners, school and student support. Its work will be redistributed and the assistant superintendent who headed it, Harriet Adair, will retire at the end of the school year. That will leave the district with just two assistant superintendents, one overseeing schools and the other overseeing curriculum and special services.
McKean pegged Yousef Awwad, the district’s chief financial officer, as a strong leader and promoted him to deputy chief executive officer, a new role in the district.
Awwad now oversees everything on the school district’s business and operational side, including human resources. McKean focuses his attention on academics.
Slowly, McKean is paring down the subordinates the superintendent must supervise. By the end of her tenure, Smith had 13 direct reports, a structure some suspected weighed her down and fueled management blunders.
Now, eight people report to McKean and by July he expects to reduce that to seven, leaving some flexibility in the structure for the new superintendent.
He hasn’t cleaned house, as some speculated an interim superintendent might.
McKean relied heavily on Smith’s trusted adviser, Chief of Staff Amanda Whalen. Although Whalen recently resigned, McKean insisted the decision was all hers and he was sad to see her leave.
McKean has held onto many of the same people who’d been running things for years, including Assistant Superintendent Antonio Lopez, Chief Equity and Diversity Officer Lolenzo Poe, and Sascha Perrins, who he tapped to be interim chief of staff.
Like Whalen’s, most of the departures from the upper ranks have been voluntary, and McKean has almost exclusively filled those positions with interim internal candidates, leaving his permanent successor to make his or her mark.
All McKean’s moves at the top haven’t been smooth.
He needed to hire a new top lawyer after the district’s longtime general counsel quit to join a private firm. His intended hire became a public embarrassment, after it surfaced his choice had been prosecuted for violating the public records law in Florida. That was news to McKean, who had made the Florida lawyer an offer pending a background check. District officials said they weren’t aware of the misdemeanor. Even the candidate said he was surprised the district hadn’t Googled him.
The top lawyer’s job still has not been filled on a permanent basis.
It isn’t only at the top that there’s a void. In October the district had 55 managerial vacancies. Now the number is around 43.
From his first days at the helm, McKean was struck that employees appeared literally “traumatized.” He isn’t the only one who’s made this observation. The search firm hired to help the school board hire a permanent leader said the new superintendent will be expected to address a “great deal of hurt and pain.”
Parents and other community members care deeply about Portland schools, a reality that has upsides and downsides.
More than most big city districts, Portland’s public schools broadly attract the children of families of both rich and poor, which builds community support for schools, McKean noted. That helps explain why recent polling showed 60 percent voter support for a school construction bond as large as $850 million.
But, in part because they care so much, the community of parents who fervently track all things Portland Public Schools can be relentless and scathing in its criticism. And they don’t always see eye to eye on what’s wrong.
McKean said the job has proved no less daunting than he expected.
“I’ve had some moments, some really hard moments and some moments where I wondered if I should continue to do the job, and I worked through that,” McKean said. “There’s a lot going on here that’s really, really good and there’s good people out there.”
Among his tough calls: McKean had to break it to the public that he was delaying the opening of two middle schools. Those schools are integral to the district’s plan to make its schools more equitable, as the K-8 schools they will replace offer less teaching time, fewer advanced classes and fewer electives. The bad news, while a painful disappointment, was taken well by the community, he said.
McKean felt he needed to take a risk and make that decision and do so early and decisively – owning up to limits on his and his staff’s abilities and bandwidth. His hope is that, in the long run, being able to execute well on what they do promise will pay off.
The next few months will determine the district’s long-term future. The school board, known for its inability to work as a team, must hire McKean’s replacement. School board elections are in May and the public will also vote on a massive school construction bond. Union negations are ongoing.
In the four months or so of his tenure that remain, McKean plans to work his way down the power structure and look for ways to improve and eliminate the silos that still exist.
“What I can do is set the stage for the person that follows me,” McKean said. “What needs to happen is central office needs to be more tightly connected to the buildings. It needs to become a school district and not a district of schools, and I think that can happen.”
— Bethany Barnes
bbarnes@oregonian.com
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