Interview/40″ with box/mike1st/mark2nd

Mike Roos

Title: Former chief executive of Los Angeles Educational Alliance for Restructuring Now, or LEARN

Born: Memphis, Tenn., 1945

Education: Bachelor’s degree in political science, Tulane University; master’s in public administration, USC

Most Admired People: Father, political science professor at Tulane; former state Assembly speakers Jesse Unruh and Willie Brown

Hobbies: Reading, golf

Career Turning Point: Deciding to take job as director of the Coro Foundation

Personal: Separated from second marriage; four daughters

By HOWARD FINE

Staff Reporter

For the past eight years, Mike Roos has taken on one of the toughest jobs in L.A.: reforming local public schools. As chief executive of the non-profit Los Angeles Educational Alliance for Restructuring Now or LEARN Roos helped establish a system of school reform with more local accountability. LEARN advocates that parents, teachers, administrators and other staff be given more authority over local school budgets and decisions. The voluntary reform program has been adopted by more than half of the 750 schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District, although its growth rate has flattened in the last few years.

Last week, Roos stepped down from his $240,000-a-year post, marking an end to another chapter in the veteran politician’s life. A native of Memphis, Tenn., Roos, 53, first entered public service nearly 30 years ago as director of the non-profit Coro Foundation, which trains future political leaders. He then served as an aide to former Los Angeles City Councilman Marvin Braude before winning election to the state Assembly in 1977. He rose quickly in the Democratic ranks of the Legislature, becoming Assembly majority leader in 1980 and speaker pro-tempore in 1986.

Two bills he co-authored became landmark pieces of legislation: the Mello-Roos Community Facilities Act, which provided a new financing structure for development infrastructure, and the Roberti-Roos Weapons Control Act. Roos left the Legislature in 1991 after Richard Riordan and other L.A. business and community leaders approached him about the LEARN post.

Question: What is your assessment of where LAUSD schools are now?

Answer: They are moving in the right direction. I think the point of reform has been proved to the degree that if you have an effective leader in the office of principal and if you have a teaching staff that really is willing to entertain new approaches to their work, we can create some of the finest schools in the land again.

The problem remains a lack of insistence from the top levels that we are going to be relentless in our effort. It requires taking something that is working well and applying it to areas where things aren’t working well. And at the LAUSD there’s none of that. In fact, there’s almost the opposite attitude of, “Don’t mention their name.” There’s no sense of the need to create heroes and role models.

Q: So what’s the problem? Is it staff? Is it Superintendent Ruben Zacarias? Is it the school board?

A: It’s basically a culture that overpowers every putative leader in the system. And even though he did a very bold thing in the personal review of the 100 lowest performing schools, Zacarias has run up against that culture himself. But I’ve yet to see a bold move to really begin to associate with the true inspirational leaders who have fundamentally turned around their schools.

Q: What are some of the key lessons you’ve learned during your eight years at LEARN?

A: What I take away is the reinforcement of that deep and fundamental belief that there is nothing more powerful than an idea and absolutely enduring commitment to make change happen.

Q: Why has the number of LAUSD schools adopting LEARN’s reform platform been tapering off in recent years?

A: Very simply, we had at the beginning the resoluteness to make this a voluntary change plan. Meaning that you had to have a vote of teachers at the 75 percent level in order to become a LEARN school. You need a principal to sign on to head a LEARN school and you need an all-parent organization to sign on. And you also need the employees to sign on with a majority vote. Very frankly, you run out of people who are that committed to change. That’s not to say there weren’t some people with legitimate concerns about LEARN. But in the main, we started losing steam because we hit the wall on the number of people interested in working a little harder to start working smarter.

Q: Now that you have stepped down from LEARN, what are your plans?

A: I guess the whole idea for the last third of my professional life was the notion of doing private business. Well I’m not going to go and learn an emerging technology. I’m not going to get into the bureaucracy of British Petroleum or Sempra Energy. It just seemed that my niche was in doing what I’ve always done, in the public policy framework, but being entrepreneurial about it. And that means going into the public affairs consulting business. I hope to do some campaigns and I hope to have some clients who have problems or opportunities in the public sector and help them plan their strategy for accomplishment.

Q: Are you going to go it alone or do you have some partners in the wings?

A: I’m going to do it alone, so far. There are people who started as a one-man operation and are still that way; and then you have Joe Cerrell, who has a whole building full of people now. You just never know.

Q: No plans for getting back into public office yourself?

A: No, it’s over. I have no motivation to do all the things that you now need to do to go back into public office. The raising of money is not pleasant. It’s almost like, if you are 17 years old, you think nothing of joining the Marine Corps. At 30 you say, “what?” Jesse Unruh always said that politics is a young person’s game. Implicit in that is that you’re so na & #271;ve at that age that if someone says your campaign is going to cost a quarter of a million dollars, you go out and raise it.

Q: Has your career turned out differently than you had envisioned?

A: I would be deceiving you if I said that once I got elected (to the Assembly), I thought about an exit strategy. I really wanted to go as high as my aptitude could take me. And, very frankly, when the LEARN offer came in 1991, I was still harboring notions of running for mayor. I told the Business Journal that in an interview in the late 1980s, that I would love to be mayor of Los Angeles.

But something happened along the way. I got involved and intrigued with LEARN. I kind of had this epiphany of, “You know, you can do public policy in a variety of ways.” There may be nothing more thrilling than to be in the well and argue it on the floor of the Legislature, but you can have a great impact just getting a group of respected leaders to come together to figure out an approach.

Q: What initially prompted you to seek a career in public service?

A: I’ve always known I would be in public service. I grew up in Memphis during the civil rights movement. My father was from Massachusetts and he married a Southern woman. When they moved to Memphis after World War II, literally at family gatherings, he was “that Yankee.” They were still talking about the Civil War as if it had happened in their lifetime. Of course as a small boy, I was absolutely mesmerized by the lunacy of this.

Then, whenever we went to the zoo, there was a sign that read: “Every Thursday, colored only.” I grew up in a town with two of everything: two men’s rooms, two water fountains, all side by side. All to accommodate this unbelievable separation. But at the same time, no one was in closer proximity to African Americans than white people, because they were in your home every day and they were treated just like family.

Well, I’m telling you, if you don’t go cuckoo over that, nothing is going to make you cuckoo.

Q: But having grown up in that world, it must have seemed natural. When did it start seeming “cuckoo”?

A: I went to school at Tulane (in New Orleans), and I saw a very different, more cosmopolitan city and the way it interacted. It was the beginning of a very dangerous time but very exciting time with the civil rights movement. I knew I had to get out of that environment, if only for awhile. My plan was to come to California, become competent in my abilities in public service and then go back to the South.

The big flaw in that was that, once I got my master’s in public administration, nobody wanted to hire me back in the South. And by then, I wasn’t trying very hard because I had fallen in love with California and Los Angeles. I believed there was as much to do out here as back in Memphis (the need for civil rights activism) was just more subtle.

Q: What do you think of the crop of people coming into public office now? Do you see any difference from when you first entered public office?

A: No, not really. Everybody has the same sense of ambition that I had. There are all kinds and manners of individuals, some who are extraordinarily brilliant and have an impeccable value system, all the way down to the most loathsome, self-interested and petty individual you could ever imagine.

There is one difference, though. And it’s the cancer of term limits that we injected into the political system. That, more than anything, is influencing and driving a certain chaotic quality to the people who are serving in public office. The enterprise is too big to rotate everybody out of the Assembly every six years. And I also have a problem with the lifetime ban (against running for the same seat again). You could sort of make a case for term limits without the lifetime ban.