Riordan Enlists 3 Colleagues for School Lobby

Launching a transcontinental offensive in his war on illiteracy, Los Angeles Mayor Richard J. Riordan announced Thursday that he has formed a coalition with three other big-city mayors to lobby Washington.

Addressing a forum at Brown University here, Riordan said Rudolph Giuliani of New York, Richard Daley of Chicago and Thomas Menino of Boston would join him in urging the federal government to increase funds for urban education.

“We have a highly disproportionate number of poor kids who are not being well-served,” Riordan said. “I think, as a group, we can effectively lobby Washington.”

Fresh from a week in Los Angeles in which he took a bus tour of city schools and unveiled a new program to provide mentors for students, Riordan visited Brown at a conference to speak about the future of urban schools.

In a grand cathedral of a lecture hall, the mayor told several hundred students and faculty members about his plan to apply the principles of business management to public education.

“The system must have strong, focused management that puts the kids first,” Riordan said. “You take strong people, empower them and give them the guts to use the ‘F’ word.”

That would be “F” for “fire,” as in, “Fire people who fail our children,” he said.

At a campus where “City Politics” is among the most popular classes, Riordan expressed frustration that, as mayor of a city with “seven wannabe politicians” on an elected school board, he has had so little power over schools.

“Not even the budget,” he lamented.

The mayor underscored his support for a system, similar to that in Chicago and other big cities, in which the mayor appoints school board members. He emphasized that, in Los Angeles, he was able to push for change only by helping to elect his favored school board candidates.

He scoffed at education’s “magic bullets” offered by politicians in Washington, D.C., and his own city: “Vouchers, phonics, bilingual education, uniforms, the Internet and on and on.”

Returning to his familiar theme of accountability, Riordan also faulted school bureaucracies in Los Angeles for supporting mediocrity and failing to weed out ineptitude.

“In 20 years, not one principal was fired for incompetence,” he said.

With dozens of principals “in disgrace” one year in the Los Angeles school system, Riordan said, the system responded “by moving them to poor neighborhoods. And then, he added, the district “had the gall to call this ‘the dance of the lemons.’ ”

Far from sounding like an official who in five months will term out of his position, Riordan sounded at times as if he were delivering a stump speech focused on what he has done for education. He talked about how his foundation has funded computer labs in Los Angeles and across the country, and how the mayor’s office supports after-school programs.

In addition to lobbying for reform, the mayor said he “personally helped to find school sites” on occasion in Los Angeles, where space is scarce.

“Most of all, I have daily demanded that we owe it to the poor children to give them a quality education,” he said.

The mayor echoed the condemnation of social promotion that he voiced this week in Los Angeles. In fact, he said, the very term should be “taken out of the vocabulary.”

Riordan reiterated his insistence that all students in Los Angeles and other school systems should master reading and writing by the end of second grade. Again he called for pre-kindergarten programs to be standard.

He told his audience about the economic consequences of failing to deliver even these minimal standards to students. In Los Angeles alone, he said, 200,000 jobs “cannot be filled by people educated locally.”