Welcome to the Party, Roy!

Today's opinion page features an op-ed from former LAUSD Superintendent Roy Romer, who -- with the help of $60 million from Bill Gates and Eli Broad -- is heading up a group that seeks to make education a top issue in the 2008 presidential campaign. All of which is fine and dandy, but it's humorous to see ol' Roy fulminating about America's high-school dropout crisis:

According to the latest "Diplomas Count" report by the Editorial Projects in Education Research Center, more than 1.2 million students are dropouts. America's high-school graduation rate has slipped behind 18 other countries, and America's share of the world's college graduates has shrunk by half. Unless there is a dramatic shift, more than 12 million students will drop out nationwide over the next decade, resulting in a $3 trillion blow to our nation's economy. ...

America's education crisis will plague every family as income gaps widen and the economic security of our country is threatened.

Why, it's almost as though Romer forgets that he used to head up the nation's second-largest school district, which has the country's sixth-worst dropout rate. And during that time, when Romer was consumed with building new schools, the district did precious little about its dropout problem -- except argue about the numbers.

We could have used this kind of concern a few years earlier ...