The Right Man for LAUSD’s Political Job

While former Colorado Gov. Roy Romer has begun speaking about the importance of educating “the new face of America,” his appointment last week as L.A. Unified’s new superintendent had everything to do with the school board’s desire for leadership reminiscent of the “old face of America.” Fed up with being a victim of state and local politics beyond its control, the board selected the former chair of the Democratic National Committee so it can become a political player, too.

The board’s choice of a politician over a seasoned educator to run LAUSD didn’t necessarily reflect faulty priorities. Rather, the Romer appointment can also be seen as a long-overdue recognition that L.A.’s $8-billion-a-year school system does not belong strictly to children and good intentions. In their urgency to push through instructional reform and begin building as many as 150 new schools, board members moved beyond idealism and entered the world of realpolitik. They acknowledged that substantive improvements cannot be made if the district’s top official lacks political prowess. “We live in a political world,” says school-board president Genethia Hayes, “and we have to grow up and learn how to deal with it.”

Hayes has been widely criticized for not being a strong believer in parliamentary process or “governing by committee,” a charge she duly acknowledges. She concedes that last year’s ungraceful sacking of former Supt. Ruben Zacarias was a political and public-relations blunder. But she is unapologetic about keeping undue outside political influence out of this year’s superintendent selection. Paradoxically, Hayes depoliticized the search for a new superintendent in order to make a highly political appointment.

Some blame state Sen. Richard Polanco’s bill authorizing the appointment of a state monitor to oversee LAUSD for scaring away qualified candidates. But the real effect of Polanco’s bill on the search process was to underscore the district’s need for a powerful in-house political advocate. As such, the board could have done worse than picking a top Democrat to negotiate the political minefields in a Democratic city in an increasingly Democratic state.

In the face of criticism, district officials have strived to highlight Romer’s familiarity and experience with educational issues. In his first press conference, the new superintendent announced his three primary concerns will be “instruction, instruction, instruction.” But Romer won’t be implementing day-to-day change in the district’s classrooms. That job will be handled by the 11 regional sub-superintendents he and interim superintendent Ramon C. Cortines will be hiring next week. Romer’s mission will be to forge the political, public and financial support the district will need if it’s going to turn around.

It may be a sign of the times that the baby-boomer-dominated school board selected an old-style, glad-handing Democrat more reminiscent of the late California Gov. Pat Brown than of, say, his new-age son, Jerry. Each era demands different qualities of its leaders, and the board’s selection of Romer may signal the beginning of a broader trend of seeking out public officials better suited to meet the state’s challenges in a new era of expansion. While former Gov. Jerry Brown played symbolic politics and advocated the philosophy of “small is beautiful” in California’s “era of limits,” his father had the political might and vision to build infrastructure in the booming postwar era.

The greatest difference between then and now, however, is the absence of a broad-based political will to pay for massive public works with tax dollars. Pat Brown had the luxury of tapping the aspirations of the then-ascendant Anglo middle class. Today’s politicians have to drum up political consensus in a state that has not fully recovered from the distrust and declinism of the post-Vietnam and Watergate eras.

School districts have recently turned to noneducators to solve the economic and political problems U.S. education faces. Many have selected businessmen whom they believe can better manage large public entities. But LAUSD already has former real-estate attorney Howard Miller as its chief operating officer, and its most glaring administrative liability is its lack of political leadership.

The school board has charged Romer with rallying greater public support for school spending and securing more dollars from the state and federal governments. In doing so, it picked an aging Anglo politician to be the face of public education for a still largely Anglo--and aging--California electorate. Moreover, Romer relishes jumping headlong into the fray, and his stature allows him the luxury of having nothing to lose. His first day in action revealed a lot about his upcoming tenure as school chief. The day after his appointment, while local activists were criticizing his selection, Romer was already in Sacramento hobnobbing with key state legislators.

Yet, that was not his first foray into California politics. In 1998, as chair of the Democratic Party, Romer made unsubstantiated accusations that GOP poll guards were keeping Latinos from voting in a special election to fill the Central California seat of the late Rep. Walter Capps. Comparing Santa Barbara County to the Alabama of the early 1960s, Romer was employing the Democratic Party’s current strategy of leveraging ethnic distrust to push Latinos to the polls. Such tactics, Romer should know, only undermine efforts to build public consensus among Californians. They only further fuel the fractiousness and parochialism that make it so difficult to get anything built in this city.

In its interviews with candidates, the school board discussed potential strategies for fighting the continuing effects of Proposition 13, the 1978 property-tax initiative that has had the effect of transferring control of schools to Sacramento. Presumably, Romer is poised to lobby for changes in the way California funds its schools. Depending on one’s point of view, this emerging battle could be either incredibly courageous or downright foolish. Either way, it is undeniable that loosening Sacramento’s grip over education spending is essential to the future well-being of L.A. schools.

The school board apparently considered Romer to be the best candidate to tackle such politically sensitive issues. Choosing a politician to run L.A. schools does not mean that the school board has betrayed its mission of reforming the system; it just means that this time they are playing for keeps. *