Romer’s staff had begged him not to go. He would “get his a– kicked,” one union organizer warned. But Romer had learned a few things about labor wars in 12 years as Colorado’s governor. He made his way down to the first pew and sat politely as the teachers tore him apart. When the rally ended, he took up a post at the front door and pressed the flesh. An African-American woman took Romer’s hand and held it. “You mind if I pray over this?” she asked. “Sure,” he replied. “Why not?” They bowed their heads together. “Lord,” the teacher prayed as her colleagues filed past, “please guide this man.”
She might as well have asked for a miracle. When the 72-year-old Romer agreed to move from his Colorado ranch to L.A. last summer to rebuild the city’s devastated school system, even his family thought he was a little addled. Now with his first school year behind him, he can see why no one else wanted the job. Nothing in his former life–not even the searing experience of defending Bill Clinton during impeachment, when Romer was Democratic Party chairman–prepared him for the dizzying politics of the nation’s second largest school district. Romer spends most days caught between seven warring school-board members, 10 labor unions, hundreds of thousands of seething parents, two carping newspapers and a cadre of power brokers who grow more impatient by the day. “I’ve received more criticism in a year here than I received in the last eight years,” he says with a sigh.
Romer is the latest in a parade of outsiders–among them an Air Force general, a U.S. attorney and a bond trader–recruited by cities to take on what may be the most thankless big job in America. In New York, voters just rejected the school chief’s plan to privatize failing schools. In Kansas City, Mo., the superintendent recently quit in disgust after a mediator couldn’t make peace between him and the school board. The average city superintendent now leaves after three years. Detroit is on its seventh school boss in a decade; D.C. is on its fifth.
The notorious Los Angeles Unified School District–a city unto itself, with 725,000 students and a $9 billion budget–is generally considered the worst case of all. At last count, 130 of the district’s 550 schools were officially “failing”–meaning that students perform poorly on state tests and aren’t improving–and there’s such a squeeze for space that more than 200,000 kids don’t even have desks. “It’s a wonder the parents didn’t shoot us,” says David Mockler, a former state Education secretary. “They should have.”
Romer has embarked on an unusual–and expensive–campaign to fix the problems. To the chagrin of critics and even some supporters, he’s only recently begun to try the usual first-step fixes, slashing the payroll, paying the bills on time, getting the bathrooms and hallways cleaned up. Instead, the Colorado cowboy is determined to win reform where it’s needed most–in the classroom itself. He’s immersed himself in the esoteric world of education theory, stuffing his battered briefcase with thick studies and tossing out phrases like “nested learning communities” as if he were a grad student writing a dissertation.
Like most politicians, including President George W. Bush, Romer once preached that the quickest way to fix schools is to hold them accountable for test scores. But after spending a few months in L.A., he says, he had a revelation: testing wouldn’t accomplish much if teachers didn’t know how to teach. Romer frenetically went to work, hiring 850 new “coaches” to help get teachers in academic shape, along with a $1 million education consultant. He heartened teachers by supporting their demands for a modified pay raise and got the board to approve a $45 million computer-based reading program, most of it paid for by the state, for 244 of the district’s worst schools.
His approach may be a bit utopian–his critics say naive–but Romer says he’s not about to let time or money stand in his way. “We in education, we plan to have a study to form a committee to have a pilot project, you understand?” he says, shaking his head in bewilderment. “I’m gonna be dead by the time we do that. I don’t have that kind of life expectancy. I want to get moving.”
Romer wasn’t moving anywhere until he was recruited by Eli Broad, a billionaire philanthropist, while organizing the Democratic convention in L.A. last summer. After offering the job to former HUD chief Henry Cisneros, who turned it down, a divided and dubious school board turned to Romer. For a man terrified of retiring to his ranch, L.A.’s ugliest job was the answer to a kind of late-life crisis. “One of the things I’m dealing with is what it is to age,” Romer says candidly. He traded in his Chrysler for a Mercedes convertible, along with a body board and a house on Venice Beach. (His wife of 48 years, Beatrice, joins him from Denver about half the month.) He eats dinners at L.A.’s best restaurants, drinks costly California wines and spends sleepless nights with the novelists he never had a chance to read: Proust, Melville, William James. And by the way, says Romer, a notorious jazz fan, “I’ve got a hi-fi system that costs more than your car.”
L.A. society, at least, quickly warmed to its newest celebrity. Never mind that Romer, a farmer who got rich as a John Deere dealer, sports Ecco hiking boots with his business suit. (“I guess I really shouldn’t be wearing these,” he mumbled to an aide one night, eying his feet as he entered a fund-raiser at the Getty Museum.) The city is willing to tolerate Rocky Mountain fashion if it means reclaiming the schools, which are a painful joke around town. The enduring symbol of L.A.’s failure is the new $150 million megaschool sitting empty downtown–because somehow the city managed to build it on a toxic dump site.
Most Angelenos address Romer as “Governor,” but that’s about the only reminder of his former life. His office these days is a converted high-school campus downtown, its sickly beige walls adorned by those black-on-white clocks that make most Americans think of recess. And the days when he had an army of aides to prep him for every meeting are long gone. Minutes from a speech at the posh Beverly Hills Hotel, the kind of event Romer calls “the Hollywood-stars thing,” he wakes up from a flu-induced nap in the back seat of his Crown Victoria and realizes that he doesn’t know a thing about the audience.
“Now, Manuel, maybe you can help me,” Romer says, leaning over the seat toward his driver. “When I give a speech like this, I need to know what the group is and what we’re doing here, you follow? I know this isn’t your job, but maybe when you see I’m giving a speech, you could whistle through the office for some material.” “Yes, Governor,” the driver says with a nod. As the car pulls up to the hotel, Romer’s attention shifts to a 1970s convertible parked out front. “Now, how can a hotel this affluent let a guy park a Mercedes that old right in front?” he says, shaking his head sadly before striding into the ballroom alone.
Despite his quirky personality, Romer seems to be winning the respect of his troops. “The man’s like a sponge,” says Debbie Leidner, a subdistrict superintendent and 30-year veteran of the schools. “He’s become an educator in eight months.” Day Higuchi, boss of the 45,000-strong teachers union, had Romer over to his mother-in-law’s house for dinner–something he never did with Romer’s predecessors. “He’s a guy to whom a deal’s a deal,” Higuchi says.
Yet Romer’s many critics still attack him for spending too much time devouring education studies and not enough time visiting the schools themselves–something he admits he hasn’t done. “If you want to fix these schools that you say are dysfunctional, you can’t do it sitting in a boardroom or having a theoretical chat,” says school-board member David Tokofsky. “It’s a ground war. You’ve got to go in.”
It’s possible, of course, that L.A.’s schools are too far gone to save–or that Romer isn’t the guy to save them. State officials seem poised to break up the district into smaller pieces if Romer doesn’t succeed. “All of us worry that this won’t end pretty,” says Romer’s 41-year-old son Chris. “Most superintendents don’t leave with the gold watch.” Romer, whose hobbies also include flying small planes, has always told his seven kids that he’d like to be a pilot in the Alaskan bush; maybe that’s next. For the moment, though, Roy Romer’s got everything a retired politician could want: volumes of great literature, the world’s most expensive stereo and the rumble of waves outside his window. And, never far from mind, the prayers of a desperate city.
