Five questions for Roy Romer

By Berny Morson, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Published May 16, 2008 at 11 p.m.

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Photo by Judy Dehaas / The Rocky

Former Gov. Roy Romer, now working for Ed in '08, an advocacy group, tells the Rocky why he thinks American schools are falling behind other countries.

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* The former governor talks about education

Romer is chairman of Ed in '08, a bi-partisan project that attempts to promote discussion of education issues during the presidential race.

Recently, Ed in '08 released a report showing that U.S. education has declined since 1983, when a national study was sharply critical of American schools.

Romer, also a former Los Angeles school superintendent, spoke with Rocky Mountain News reporter Berny Morson:

1Why do you feel American schools are going downhill?

Since '83, we've really made relatively little progress, we've really been static. The rest of the world has been going up very rapidly.

Among 30 industrial nations, we're 25th from the top in math. We're 21st from the top in science. Other countries have made great progress. Poland, South Korea, Singapore, Finland, Canada - we simply have not kept pace with the progress in education worldwide. Graduation will occur in a couple of weeks, and nearly 1.2 million kids won't graduate who should have graduated. We have a real crisis on our hands.

2 Why did this happen?

We have not put the emphasis on education other nations have. We need to raise our standards, need to reach for higher expectations for all students. We've got to improve teaching in the classroom. We're going to turn over three million teachers in the next 10 years, and we simply have got to make that profession more attractive than it is now.

We don't spend adequate time. The school year is too short, the school day is too short. Compared to the average (of 30 nations) we're 13 days shorter (each) school year.

3 What is Ed in '08 attempting to accomplish?

Our basic argument is, we are in a crisis. It has grave economic implications for this nation. We need presidential leadership to help address it, in addition to state and local. We think the areas that should be addressed are standards, teaching and time. On teaching, we think we need to differentiate pay for teachers, like Denver is doing. We need to pay more for a tougher assignment, pay more for higher skills that a person brings, like math and science, pay more for better performance. We have to do that with teachers, not to teachers.

4 Why haven't we heard more about education in the presidential race?

Between now and the general election you're going to find more discussion of education. The economics of this country are going to drive us to the educational issue. Because if you sit with the average American family who says, "We have to get more income into this family," who are worried about their kids owning the house that they now live in - the key to that is higher skills and higher knowledge.

5 The Colorado Student Assessment Program, which started when you were governor, is very unpopular with teachers. They say the tests take too much time and aren't a good measure of achievement. Did you envision this program going a different direction?

When we started CSAP, we were just taking the first step. We did not know as much as we now know about where we need to go and how we get there. I think this state is very correct in saying, "We've got to reach for a better set of standards and a more authentic set of tests." I did diagnostic tests every 90 days in Los Angeles on my kids learning to read. If you give a kid a test that's really authentic, you can identify, well, this kid has five of these points but he's failing on these two. Then you go in and you work on those two.

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