Romer: Where's the education campaign?

Roy Romer dropped into town this week to promote his new endeavor: ED in '08, an effort to get education onto the agenda in the presidential campaign.

So far, it can't be declared a rip-roaring success. Romer, the former Colorado governor and L.A. Unified superintendent, admits that education hasn't exactly been a front-burner issue, although he says he's had good talks with all of the candidates. As an undeclared Democratic superdelegate, you'd think he might have a little leverage to apply to Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. But he concedes that the candidates have been more interested in other topics -- the economy, the war, the environment, those flag lapel pins...

Romer says he's already thinking past all that. In a chat at The Times, he said he's thinking about the pitch he'll make to the next president, whoever that is. Twenty-five years after the Reagan administration published the groundbreaking report "A Nation at Risk,"  he says, the nation is more at risk than ever from better educated foreign competitors in Asia and Europe. The countries with the best educational systems tend to differ from the United States in a few key ways, he says. They often have national standards for education, they select teachers from a pool of their best college graduates, and they have cultures that value and encourage education.

The U.S. public will never stand for a national curriculum, Romer says, but the next president should convene a meeting of all 50 governors and propose that they use international benchmarks as goals for their schools. In return, he says, the federal government should promise resources to help them reach those goals. Once Americans see how far their schools lag behind such countries as Finland, Singapore and Poland, they'll support a push to raise state standards.

He laid out five fundamentals of a better educational system:

1) Higher standards.
2) More rigorous curricula.
3) Diagnostic testing to keep students on course.
4) Better use of data in school management.
5) More intensive teacher training.

Romer noted that the federal government has transformed the nation's educational system before -- most notably in the 1860s, when it created land grant colleges, and after World War II, when it created the GI Bill. "We know how to do it," he said.

Romer also took part in a panel discussion on education Monday at the Milken Institute Global Conference at the Beverly Hilton. Joining the stage with Lowell Milken of the Milken Family Foundation, philanthropist Eli Broad and Nobel-winning economist Gary Becker, he said that the United States suffers from a lack of political will -- and vision. In his experiences in both Los Angeles and Colorado, he said, people were unwilling to see the educational crisis before their eyes.

"Everybody thought they were doing OK," he said. "They were doing very badly."

-- Mitchell Landsberg

Photo of Roy Romer by Ann Cusack / Los Angeles Times