Former Gov. Roy Romer will lead a $60 million, nonpartisan campaign to hurtle education to the top of the presidential-election agenda, an unprecedented push for major school reform on a federal scale.
Philanthropists Bill Gates and Eli Broad announced Wednesday that they will fund “Ed in ’08” – a force of “public awareness and action” with “troops” in up to a dozen states and an interactive website to mobilize the public.
The project, run like a presidential campaign for a single issue, is an attempt to show voters that America’s education system is slipping in the global economy and to pressure presidential candidates for solutions.
“We need to have fundamental overhaul,” said Romer, who was superintendent of Los Angeles schools for six years after serving three terms as Colorado governor. “Our expectations are too low. We want to make sure that education is elevated as the No. 1 priority.”
The initiative – called Strong American Schools – will not advocate specific reforms but would set the “framework for an in-depth discussion,” Romer said.
“Ed in ’08” will focus on ramping up curriculum standards, improving teacher performance and pay, and spending more time and money on learning.
Among the solutions up for debate are expanding the school day or the school year and allowing non-English-speaking students more time to graduate.
The reform movement could bring sweeping changes to America’s public-education system, which traditionally has left curriculum and policy decisions to the states and local school boards.
“Americans are not only beginning to understand the crisis but starting to ask questions and demand action,” said Allan Golston, president of the U.S. program for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
More than a million U.S. kids – one every 29 seconds – drop out of school each year, Golston said. And children in Singapore and China learn more math in elementary school than many American students are expected to know by graduation, Romer said.
“Ed in ’08” workers will set up offices in key battleground states during the presidential campaign, possibly including Colorado.
The campaign’s first ad is of a student scrawling “A histery of Irak” on a chalkboard. “Debating Iraq is tough. Spelling it shouldn’t be,” the ad says. And later: “Ed in ’08 isn’t a candidate. It’s a movement.”
Gates, chairman of Microsoft, and Broad, founder of two Fortune 500 companies, have donated about $2 billion to improve education in smaller-scale projects over the years.
“I have reached the conclusion, as has the Gates foundation, which has done good things also, that all we’re doing is incremental,” Broad told The New York Times this week. “If we really want to get the job done, we have got to wake up the American people that we have got a real problem, and we need real reform.”
The Gates Foundation’s education efforts included a 2000 grant to Denver’s Manual High School, which is now closed.
Romer, a Democrat, will co-chair the effort with Marc Lampkin, a Republican lobbyist and former deputy campaign manager for President Bush. The campaign was announced in South Carolina, where Democratic presidential candidates will debate this week.
Bill Hogan, senior policy analyst with the Center for Public Integrity and director of the “Buying of the President 2008 Project,” which studies presidential-campaign financing, said he could not think of a more expensive single-issue initiative in a presidential race.
“I don’t think there’s ever been anything like this in a presidential campaign – where it’s aimed at pushing and addressing an issue without some sort of outcome being pushed,” Hogan said.
The national call for radical education reform echoes sentiment among Colorado officials, who this year initiated a statewide conversation on school change.
House Speaker Andrew Romanoff, armed with the “Tough Choices, Tough Times” national report as a guide, is touring schools to gather ideas. A January meeting on the report drew 500 people to the Colorado Convention Center.
And Gov. Bill Ritter this week announced a commission that will study education reform from preschool through college.
Denver Public Schools Superintendent Michael Bennet, who devotes much of his job to talking about the district’s abysmal student achievement, thinks honesty about education problems will spark a demand for change.
“We’ve been working on this in Denver, and to see it on a national level is tremendous,” he said. “Given the state of education in the country, it’d be terrible if it weren’t one of the top agenda items debated in the election.”
Aurora Public Schools Superintendent John Barry said he applauds anyone who brings education to the forefront of a national debate.
“We have an exceedingly high dropout rate in the nation, and we have that problem also (in Aurora),” Barry said.
The biggest problem school reformers face nationally is that the majority of people think school systems are working well, said education-policy expert Van Schoales.
“If people knew what the challenges are or what the gaps are – how many kids didn’t graduate from high school, how many aren’t prepared to work for the workforce – I think most people would say, ‘Yeah, we have a crisis on our hands,”‘ said Schoales, a former Gates grant recipient who now works at the Piton Foundation in Denver.
ROY ROMER
1956-66: Practiced law in Denver
1958-62: Colorado House of Representatives
1960: Named chairman of the Colorado Committee on Education Beyond High School
1962-66: Colorado Senate
1975: Colorado commissioner of agriculture
1977-86: Colorado treasurer
1987-98: Colorado governor
1994-95: Chairman of the Education Commission of the States
2000-06: Superintendent of Los Angeles Unified School District
Current: Strong American Schools chairman
ABOUT THE CAMPAIGN
Strong American Schools, a project of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, is a nonpartisan campaign supported by the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
The foundations have committed to spending up to $60million to make education a top issue in the presidential campaign under the slogan “Ed in ’08.” The effort aims “to give a voice to every American who demands strong leadership to improve our schools.”
SAS is a 501c3 nonprofit and does not support or oppose any candidate for public office and does not take positions on legislation.
Sources: Marquis Who’s Who, the state of Colorado and The Denver Post
Compiled by Barbara Hudson of the Denver Post Research Library
