The Super.

• Author: MILLER, MATTHEW

L.A. Superintendent Roy Romer may be the most talented man ever to run a big-city school district, also bound to fail. There's a lesson in that.

ROY ROMER FLIPPED THROUGH THE 20-page list of demands and felt the anger rising. He'd rushed across the country for this? It was October 30, and Romer, former three-term Democratic governor of Colorado who had taken over July 1 as superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), had caught the first plane from Pittsburgh that morning for what he'd been told would be the final days of teacher-contract negotiations. The stalled talks had put most other district business on hold. For months Romer had personally wooed the union over breakfasts, at church meetings, and in countless listening sessions. As governor he had successfully mediated teacher talks in Denver and felt a reprise was certain. With state coffers flush, Romer reckoned, he'd lock up a win-win deal with the teachers early, clearing the decks for a single-minded district focus on better instruction for L.A.'s languishing kids. He'd offered a 10-percent raise from the start, hoping to skip the usual inch-by-inch dance. Romer had even reneged on a deal inked by his predecessor that tied administrators' pay hikes to teachers', leaving more money in the pot for teachers alone. Instead of thanking him, Romer knew, the union was plotting with administrators to gin up a strike.

Now, in the conference room at union headquarters, Romer, 72, flanked by 10 district colleagues, faced a phalanx of union reps across the table. Union president Day Higuchi walked Romer through page after page of demands. Eliminate travel for certain types of training, establish a "classroom bill of rights," cap class size permanently in all grades. District staffers exchanged confused glances. Higuchi was presenting the work of virtually every union committee. Most of the demands had been heard before.

"This is not what I expected," Romer said finally, boiling over. "I've been devoting a lot of time to this process, and neglecting other things I need to do in this district. It doesn't look like you're ready to seal the deal. I'm questioning whether you want this thing sealed at all."

"No, no, no," the union leaders said in chorus. They weren't trying to kill things, they insisted. This is important for our internal politics, they explained. We need to be able to say these issues were raised directly with the superintendent.

"When you get rid of all these," Romer replied, waving the handout, "and you're ready to deal with four or five important issues, I'll come back into the picture."

Romer was having his epiphany. He had impeccable pro-labor credentials. As chairman of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), Romer had plotted political strategy with the teacher unions, one of his party's most loyal and powerful supporters. Yet four months in the trenches had Romer thinking dangerous thoughts; namely that the teacher unions might be the biggest problem urban school systems faced. The bosses ran the place like an old-style industrial union, he felt, screaming about wages, hours, and working conditions--not collaborating like professionals on ways to lift student achievement. They demonized Romer and his staff to build power. And since the union largely controlled school-board elections, the whole system felt rigged. How was a super supposed to make headway when the union was on both sides of the table? Every time he tried to hang tough on issues of management authority over teacher assignment or training, for example, the union would get four members on Romer's seven-member board to pull the rug out. Frustrated, Romer had to face facts: The radical change in labor relations he felt was a prerequisite for improved student performance was not going to happen. It was tragic Romer thought, but it was also reality. Time for Plan B.

Romer's appointment last year marked a climax of sorts for Los Angeles after a decade of well-meaning but ineffective attempts to fix its schools. In the early '90s, civic leaders flocked to "systemic reform" schemes with acronyms like LAMMP and LEARN. Millions of foundation dollars documented the dysfunction of the district central office, dubbed "the forbidden city" by one local wag. In 1999, frustrated by the district's resistance to change and by his own lack of official power over the schools, Mayor Richard Riordan, an uncharismatic multimillionaire with a strong moral streak, successfully bankrolled a three-person slate of reform-minded school-board candidates. The new board promptly ousted Ruben Zacarias, a superintendent widely viewed as incompetent. His interim successor, the well-regarded educator Ramon Cortines, came out of retirement to reorganize the sprawling district into 11 "local" districts with the hope that they might prove more manageable. Cortines also established the depressing (but revealing) goals of a textbook and clean bathroom for every student.

These sad milestones had not been reached when Romer found himself in L.A. last spring helping plan the Democratic convention. One day he met with Eli Broad, the billionaire real-estate developer and civic activist, in Broad's office in Century City. As they gazed over the L.A. basin from Broad's sweeping 38th-floor view, Romer told Broad about his passion for schooling. Romer had chaired the key education forums in the governors' groups. He'd studied the standards movement and felt it held promise for poor kids. He told Broad he planned to launch a think-tank-style project that he hoped would do for schools what the famed Jackson Hole group had done to advance ideas on health reform. Broad instantly saw a different possibility. With interim superintendent Cortines set to depart, he told Romer, the L.A. superintendent's job was open. Why don't you consider it, Broad suggested. It would be a chance to "do" education before reflecting on it.

Romer was brought up short. He had just bought a new house in Denver. He had a ranch outside of town, and 18 grandchildren. Most of his contemporaries were on the golf course. But the audacity of the idea appealed to him. Could a farmboy turned Midwestern governor possibly fix city schools in which 83 languages were spoken? It would mean walking into a district where 70 percent of the children were Latino, with more school kids (725,000) than 29 states. With 800 principals and 35,000 teachers, LAUSD's $8.8 billion budget dwarfed Colorado's; indeed, its budget exceeded that of 50 countries. As a matter of management, in dollar terms, the district would rank 229th on the Fortune 500. And the sprawling district was unimaginably diverse, encompassing dilapidated, gang-ridden campuses in South Central, where little kids prayed for no gunshots as they walked to school, as well as shiny new facilities on the affluent west side, where 17-year-old boys fondled designer-clad girlfriends in their BMWs between classes.

The district's educational woes, Romer was told, were equally outsized. A stunning two-thirds of L.A. third graders could not read at grade level. The dropout rate was more than twice the state average. One in four teachers lacked proper training and credentials, including roughly half of all newly hired teachers. The district had balked on an earlier pledge to end "social promotion" when up to 60 percent of kids were in danger of flunking.

What can I bring to this chaos? Romer asked himself. While he'd always seen himself as a man of action, he'd been a big-picture political leader, not a frontline implementer. Romer had no constituency and no more knowledge of L.A. than a tourist. But he had the itch. "I'm a challenge junkie," he said. "This is the hardest job in America." One of Romer's many baffled Colorado friends said pursuing the post seemed like "an attempt to avoid obscurity." Days after Broad planted the seed, however--and after consulting with his family, who knew what that sound in Romer's voice meant--Romer decided he would go for it.

"My first thought," recalls school-board president Genethia Hudley Hayes, a black reformer backed by Mayor Richard Riordan, "was, `this is a 71-year-old white guy from Colorado.'" Romer dogged her for days seeking an audience to discuss his interest. Hayes asked him point blank about rumors that Romer was looking for a credential that would position him to become secretary of education if Al Gore won the election. Romer told her no: Like Hayes, he saw urban school improvement as a matter of social justice. And L.A.'s ethnic cauldron was America's future. If its troubled schools could be turned around, a new sense of hope would spread to other big cities. Hayes was impressed.

As the father of a pre-schooler, so was I. After moving to Los Angeles a few years earlier, I'd written several pieces on the schools and knew what a mess Romer was taking on. The idea that a man of Romer's stature was jumping in was genuinely exciting. Surely an accomplished, substantive politician seasoned by decades of experience (and not thinking about his next job) would have a shot at altering these kids' prospects. So I struck a deal to follow him on and off for what turned out to be most of his first year in office.

After months of watching Romer closely, I'm convinced that his experience, skills, and intellect make him the most talented person ever to hold the superintendent's job in Los Angeles, and perhaps in the nation. I also believe Romer is almost certain to fail, if by success we mean moving the needle on poor student achievement in a meaningful, lasting way. At a time when President Bush has pledged to "leave no child behind," with an education reform effort that no honest person can believe will make more than a marginal difference to troubled urban schools, Romer's early tenure shows how shockingly hollow the education debate remains. It's not simply that we're not having the right dialogue about urban schools; like some terminal patient in...