Q+A: Roy Romer

By Emily Richmond (contact)

Monday, Oct. 1, 2007 | 7:01 a.m.

Tougher standards, merit pay for teachers and a longer school day - those are the pillars of the Ed in '08 campaign, which rolled into town this week.

Sponsored by the nonpartisan Strong American Schools, the campaign has the backing of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the Broad Education Foundation. With $60 million to spend, the campaign is hitting the road in key states in an effort to keep education at the top of voters' lists before they head to the polls.

The changes the campaign is promoting don't come cheap, and will require support from local and state officials as well as taxpayers , who ultimately pay much of the tab. But in the long run, campaign organizers argue, that should translate to improvements in America's public schools. The campaign already has attracted local bipartisan support. Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman, state Sen. Barbara Cegavske, R-Las Vegas, and Clark County Commission Chairman Rory Reid have all signed on.

Roy Romer, the campaign's chairman, past superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District and former governor of Colorado, sat down with the Sun to talk about the campaign's goals, why high school dropouts hurt the whole community and ways public schools can improve the quality of teaching.

You begin making the case economically, and showing the increased productivity you get from a high school graduate compared to a dropout. Over a lifetime that amounts to a great deal of money for the community. The older residents in this town ought to be very interested in these kids staying in school and becoming more productive, because that supports Social Security. Also, you decrease the crime rate when you raise the graduation rate, and that's something that benefits all of us. The other way to look at it is if you have any sense of humanity, you want everybody to have a chance to lead a decent life, and getting an education is a necessary part of that.

Why is Ed in '08 focusing on Nevada?

Because it's one of the early primary states (along with Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina), Nevada's getting a lot of attention. The goal of our campaign is to get citizens to really dig in with the candidates and ask, "What are you going to do about education - tell us your thoughts." Candidates are not talking a lot about education right now because they worry about losing the votes of people with special interests. We're aware of that, but we also think there's going to be a groundswell of people saying, "My greatest concern is that my kids get prepared for life. I want my kids to be able to own a home like I do, go to college like I did."

According to results released this week, Nevada students performed better on the National Assessment of Educational Progress than in prior years, but still lag behind those in most other states. The national average also went up on the test. Are American students catching up with their peers in other countries?

If the world's top 29 nations had an Olympics for math, not only is America not on the podium getting a medal, we're 23rd from the (top) of the line. There are a whole lot of folks ahead of us. The greatest problem is our expectations are too low. We have to raise standards and make them more rigorous, and more uniform, across state lines. We don't want to have them legislated by Congress. We believe there's a way for the states to get together and voluntarily agree to standards that are benchmarked against the rest of the world.

Isn't that what President Bush's education reform initiatives were supposed to accomplish? Should No Child Left Behind be scrapped?

It should be revised, not scrapped. It's a form of accountability that needs to stay and needs to be improved. In Los Angeles (where Romer was superintendent from 2001 to last year), we have the pressure of paying attention to minority groups and low-performing students. That's a good thing - someone needs to hold our feet to the fire. But there are flaws. You shouldn't have a whole school labeled as failing because they missed one out of 18 indicators. The testing isn't bad, it's how we use the testing.

What about the National Assessment of Educational Progress? Is that a better barometer of how our public schools are performing?

I used to train people as pilots, and give people written tests of whether they could navigate. But the real test was whether you could go out and fly the plane. That's a test that has consequences. NAEP is very good, but it can't be the only indicator.

During your tenure as governor, school districts in Colorado were among the first in the nation to test "pay for performance" on a large scale. Some teachers oppose merit pay models that rely heavily on evaluations by their principals. How would you measure a teacher's job performance?

One of the problems we face is retaining good teachers in the profession. If you look at the salary scale and where you can go in 30 years as a teacher, it's discouraging. As a country we haven't put enough money on the table when it comes to paying our educators. We need a sophisticated system of evaluation, and you need to include the teachers in this. It can't just be the results of a standardized test. The toughness of an assignment, the skills you bring to the job and your performance in the classroom are all factors. We need to get a more clear understanding of the expectation levels, and we need to train teachers in a much better way than we do now.

Nevada ranks 49th in the nation for education funding. Can the goals you've outlined be met without more money?

You can do better by using the money you already have more wisely - that's probably true in every state. World Market and CityCenter are just two examples of the massive development that's happening all over this town. If you've got the kind of wealth in this community to create that kind of infrastructure, you have to be wise enough to also invest in the schools.