Roos to Quit as Head of School Reform Group

Mike Roos, the hard-edged former assemblyman who has been the Los Angeles business community’s attack dog on school reform for most of this decade, announced Monday that he will leave his job as president of the reform group LEARN at the end of August.

Roos’ departure coincides with a decision by LEARN’s business and political backers to pursue an alliance of five organizations pushing to fix the public school system.

From LAAMP, a countywide group formed to manage a multimillion-dollar reform, to the Committee on Effective School Governance, which harshly criticized management by the Board of Education, the groups have pursued varied goals even though they shared much the same base of support.

Now it is time for them to develop a common purpose, said William Ouchi, vice dean of the UCLA Anderson School of Business and head of the LEARN governing board.

Leaders of the groups said the success of Mayor Richard Riordan’s reform slate in this spring’s Los Angeles Board of Education elections set the stage for the groups to rethink their visions and style.

“This may be an exciting opportunity for us to help make wholesale changes,” said LAAMP Chairman Virgil Roberts, an attorney and civil rights leader.

As reform organizations shift from criticizing to supporting school board efforts, “you cannot be speaking with several different messages,” Ouchi said. “You have to have a harmonious voice.”

The heads of the organizations will meet over the next six months to rethink their missions and to work out new relationships and staffing, Ouchi said.

Departing after eight years as the head of LEARN, Roos said he believes he has accomplished more than he expected.

“I really think we have drawn some blood where we needed to draw blood,” he said.

Roos said he will form a public interest consulting firm.

His duties will be taken over for the next six months by Mary Chambers, LEARN’s former executive vice president, who now runs a management consulting firm.

Chambers said she will work with the executives of the other four groups to shepherd the conversation about their futures. Chambers, whose husband is the secretary of the Los Angeles school board, said she will not seek a permanent job with LEARN.

“Rather than speculate about who should be the right leader and what should be the right structure, [the organizations] are coming together to talk about what needs to be done,” Chambers said, “then go out and look for a leader.”

LEARN was formed by Riordan and several of the city’s business elite, including former Lockheed Chairman Roy Anderson and former Arco President Robert Wycoff.

Under Roos’ leadership, LEARN drafted a comprehensive school reform plan based on increasing personnel and budget control of individual schools while ensuring greater accountability.

As more than half the Los Angeles schools adopted the LEARN plan over the last five years, Roos continued to battle district officials who, he believed, were not fully committed to changing the system.

Assessing LEARN’s effects has proved difficult, especially because the district has used several different standardized tests in this decade. A 1998 report by the Evaluation and Training Institute found LEARN and charter schools doing moderately better than those not in a reform plan.

A Times analysis of 1997 and 1998 test scores found LEARN schools improved about twice as much as those not pursuing any reform.

However, LEARN’s goal of signing up every school faltered last year when there were no new recruits. Responding to the crisis, LEARN’s working group pressured Supt. Ruben Zacarias to declare that all schools would have to adopt a reform plan.

The remaining 300 schools adopted plans this year. All but 40 chose reforms other than LEARN.

Besides LEARN, LAAMP and the Committee on Effective School Governance, members on the new study committee will come from Los Angeles Educational Partnership) and the Los Angeles Business Advisors.

LAAMP provides funding and technical assistance to 28 school families across Los Angeles County. It has a contract through 2001 with the organization formed by billionaire Walter Annenberg to administer a $53-million donation for national school reform.

The educational partnership, formed in 1984, provides technical support to individual schools.

The business group was formed by 25 chief executives of companies to improve the economic environment of Los Angeles.

The Committee on Effective School Governance was formed last year by members of the other four groups to generate interest in the school board elections. It said the old board was unfocused and micromanaged district business.

Roberts said the committee “demonstrated that there is a real community of interest about what ought to take place, and perhaps a number of organizations could work together on a broad array of issues.”