Romer Gives Last Annual Address to Administrators

Six years ago, when Roy Romer arrived to take over the Los Angeles schools, many teachers and administrators were skeptical.

The former Colorado governor, backed by then-Mayor Richard Riordan and billionaire Eli Broad, was not only unschooled in the workings of the Los Angeles Unified School District, he was not even an educator.

On Wednesday, about 1,500 school principals and other administrators gathered at the convention center to hear Romer’s final annual address, and by all appearances, the departing superintendent won them over. They showered him with four standing ovations and unscripted tributes, and seemed skeptical about who could fill his shoes.

In turn, Romer congratulated his assembled troops, calling them “one of the fastest-changing, most effective groups of educators in the United States.”

He pulled out well-traveled displays depicting six years of rising bar graphs and upward, squiggly lines. “I tried to give this speech without charts,” he said, drawing laughter. He also got laughs for his response to getting a plaque (“I think this is a plot to keep me from re-upping”) and when he shut down a standing ovation after 25 seconds (“You’re cutting in on my time”).

Romer, 78, who plans to retire as soon as a successor is named, seemed grateful for a receptive audience.

Recently, the district has been under relentless attack by Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who as part of his campaign to take over Los Angeles schools tells audiences of a failed system that settles for high dropout rates and low achievement.

On Wednesday, Romer told his side of the story. He listed his five key instructional strategies: high expectations; a rigorous, full and uniform curriculum; focused training of teachers; testing whose results were immediately applied to teaching; and serious data analysis that drove decisions.

He also talked of navigating the next, crucial steps, especially in improving the upper grades: “Nobody can be satisfied where we are.”

The “real difference” for students, he said, “will not be dictated by what they write in Sacramento. It’s going to be determined by the degree that every one of us in this room continues to improve our skill set.... We have begun to refine our skills and got deeper and deeper and deeper into how you really enable a student to learn.”

It was also a day to forget former grievances. Romer praised school board member Marguerite Poindexter LaMotte as a person who pursued educational equity.

LaMotte, an African American, had once infuriated Romer, who is white, by trying unsuccessfully to pass a resolution that, in part, accused him of not doing enough to promote African American administrators to senior positions.

On Wednesday, LaMotte dismissed “all the fussing that we did.... I do respect you and I thank you.”

The morning event, coming as the Legislature is gearing up to authorize substantial mayoral control of the schools, embodied a fin de siecle sense that went beyond Romer’s retirement. An era was ending.

Two school board members rose to warn of possible worse times ahead. Julie Korenstein called the mayor’s bill “pitiful” and “horrifying,” but before she could finish, people filming the event for the school district television station shut down because things were running long.

As the crowd filed out, Alison Pickering, a literacy content expert, said she saw the morning as “an affirmation of things.... We’re very sorry to see Romer go, and we view the future with a lot of trepidation.”