(Happy Friday! Light posting until I finish a pesky deadline due on Monday…..)
But in the meantime, an answer to the question that is undoubtedly on everyone’s minds…..
since we know NONE OF YOU WOULD DREAM OF SPENDING VALUABLE FRIDAY WORK TIME CRUISING THE WEB FOR TORRID NEW LU-U-UV GOSSIP at sites like Mayor Sam’s Sister City, which is now busy speculating without the benefit of, well, facts, that there’s another other woman in AV’s life.
Instead, what you really want to know on this hot Friday afternoon is….what is former LA schools superintendent Roy Romer doing now that he’s not making excuses for LAUSD’s hideous dropout rate????
Well, we’re glad you asked.
He’s working for Bill Gates. It seems that Bill and Melinda’s foundation is putting up half the money for a $60 million campaign organization called “ED in ’08” that has been formed in order to hector all the ’08 presidential candidates into talking about education. (A genuinely worthy cause.) Romer is the campaign’s head guy.
“We are in a world economy in which we just simply cannot afford to have 1.2 million drop-outs in our high schools a year,” Romer is quoted as saying in this article on the subject on Radio Iowa. “…Therefore, the federal government has got an economic and a vested interest to try to say, ‘States, we need to address this. We need to address this together…Let’s work it out.'”
Yeah, yeah, we all know Romer’s really a swell guy. But, oh, the irony!
Alright, sorry to have interrupted your web cruising. Carry on.
And, hey, see you at the movies!
This post is about to rotate off your ‘frontpage,’ and I decided, before it did, I ought to take a look at Roy’s web presence. It’s an okay enough site. And, I’ve bookmarked it, so I can check in from time-to-time. It’s weird that on every new page it asks me for a user name and password, but if I just click ‘cancel’ the page loads anyway. Maybe it’s my browser.
I was disappointed for Angelenos that they were disappointed by Roy. He really was a darned decent Gov. He had a Republican legislature to deal with and still managed to accomplish a fair bit for Colorado. Historically, Colorado has had Democrat governors, and Republican legislatures… and, until recently the state was in pretty good shape. TABOR has screwed up our state finances from now until eternity. Our budgetary process has become one set of sorry workarounds after another. Sort of like a poorly designed bit of software. We’re always patching.
I’ve decided that if Romer couldn’t accomplish much with LAUSD, that not much can be accomplished with LAUSD. I figured he had a pretty good shot at it. And, I was disappointed for him, and for you all, that he couldn’t take you where you wanted to go. If he gets tired of ED08, there’s an institution of higher ed out here that could really use him. Maybe he’ll come ‘home.’