5/3/05 -- At an age when many have retired, Roy Romer is still working nonstop. In July 2000, when he was 71, Romer took the job as superintendent of the Los Angeles school system.
As the former three-term governor of Colorado, Romer had already endured the pressure cooker of endless demands and limited resources. Still, Romer says, leading Los Angeles public schools into the 21st century is twice as hard as being a governor.
Romer, who gave the keynote speech at American School Board Journal’s Luncheon for School Leaders, says he went after the “toughest job in America” because he wanted to improve learning.
He is currently overseeing one of the largest capital outlay projects in the nation, a $14 billion facilities plan that will build 160 new schools and repair and renovate hundreds of others. Acquiring property in land-scarce Los Angeles is a feat unto itself, costing the school district about $5 million per acre.
Among Romer’s challenges in Los Angeles: 85 percent of students are eligible for free or reduced-price lunches, and the enrollment encompasses nearly 90 different languages. But he isn’t letting these challenges stop him and his staff from raising the bar and expecting students to succeed.
“I have 750,000 kids in L.A., and they need a life,” Romer says. “So they need to have a skill set that nobody expects them to have” -- a skill set that will allow them to compete with China, which is producing six times as many engineers as the United States, and a skill set that can challenge India, which counts computer programmers and other white-collar workers among its top exports.
Competing in an increasingly fast-paced global society, Romer says, means banishing the institutional racism that hides behind lower standards for different groups. “We need to look at the capability of all children.”
In addition to cultivating a belief system that reflects high expectations for all students, Romer has instituted a number of policies that have yielded large gains.
For example, all students between kindergarten and ninth-grade undergo a diagnostic assessment every 10 weeks. “We believe we need to measure what you do, otherwise you won’t know what you need to do,” he says.
Professional development has also been ramped up for the city’s teachers in the form of 850 academic coaches. Meanwhile, Romer has made the curriculum more rigorous, with a current focus on math.
These changes have helped raise elementary students’ test scores by 172 points compared to the state’s average increase of 111 points. Attaining similar results for middle and high school students is next on Romer’s to-do list, which doesn’t appear to be getting smaller any time soon. But he doesn’t seem to mind.
“I think this is the most relevant job in America right now,” he says.