BY DANIEL KROOP

Richard Riordan was mayor of Los Angeles, Calif., from 1993 until 2001, and served as the California Secretary of Education from 2003 until 2005. As mayor, Riordan managed a city with over four million people and a gross metropolitan product of over $580 billion, a greater task than running many countries. During his term, Riordan focused on cutting crime, improving business conditions, and unifying Los Angeles’s sprawling and diverse population. As mayor, he also worked to reform the Los Angeles school system, including by investing millions of dollars of his own money in material improvements.

Here, Mayor Riordan talks to the HPR about what it is like to run America’s second largest city, from the challenges of executive leadership to counter-terrorism and education reform.

Harvard Political Review: No Child Left Behind was introduced after you ended your term as mayor, but do you think that “top-down” federal standards are the best way to go about education? Is it a good idea to have a kind of a national system for education, or is it better to let cities deal with it?

Richard Riordan: I think No Child Left Behind is the first time Washington has had any effect on local education at all. I’ll give Ted Kennedy and President Bush credit for putting in something where you’re holding people accountable at the local level. It’s very imperfectly done, and I think they’re trying to make some changes now. But you have to have some accountability. If you make the claim that, “Well, you’re teaching to the test,” you’re saying, “Don’t test kids.”

I would like to see the local school districts have their own testing, too, and literally know how students are doing, how teachers are doing, how principals are doing, and have local control. But unfortunately the unions get involved, and unions are against any form of accountability. They’re against testing, they’re against tracking students in order to find the ones who need remedial help, and they don’t want you to fire anybody. There’s just zero accountability. If you had to pick a reason—though it’s not the only reason—for why the schools are doing poorly, it would be the unions.

HPR: In recent years Los Angeles has seen a number of its component neighborhoods—most notably the San Fernando Valley, which sought to secede in 2002—call for greater autonomy. How do you really manage a city as diverse socially, economically, and physically as Los Angeles? How do you speak for all of them as a leader?

RR: One basic question is whether we ought to split this city up into parts. But I think everybody’s a key part of the city; you need the wealthy because they pay the taxes and own the companies that provide the jobs. You need the skilled workers, the middle class workers, to compete, to have high-tech companies that compete, and you need the manual laborers. The city works well with this – to split it up is complicated since you may be taking too many of the taxpayers and putting them into the one city, or taking too many of the poor and putting them into another city. And that’s why I was against the secession of the Valley. The only positive I could ever see coming out of it relates to education—if I could do it, I’d break the district into 50 different school districts where you can really have accountability. You’d have a superintendent who could relate to every school in his district, every day, whereas the current superintendent probably hasn’t seen 5 percent of the schools in LA school district.

HPR: Terrorism really wasn’t on the agenda for a lot of the time when you were mayor, but now that it has become such a big issue on the national political radar, how has the burden changed for mayors in cities?

RR: I think antiterrorism is a very local issue. Washington isn’t going to be able to run your airport, protect your reservoirs, or protect your ports. They can supply you information about terrorists, but essentially you have to have your own system of protection. You have to “harden your target”—make it look to a terrorist like that isn’t something he wants to go after because he’ll probably get caught.

There’s still the problem of ownership—you need one owner who’s responsible for safety and antiterrorism. And at the airport, you have something like 16 federal agencies plus a few local agencies with diffused power and it doesn’t work that well. You need somebody at the top who can make quick decisions. If a plane gets blown up on LAX, who decides whether you leave the plane there for six months while the FBI studies the evidence, or you clear it out so the airport can get back to normal and so people won’t see this horrible sight?

As mayor I also had real problems with the federal government’s willingness to share information. There’s a terrorist named Ahmed Ressam who was picked up coming over the Canadian border. It was actually a female security guard who thought this guy looked strange. They picked him up, and he had plans to blow up the space needle in Seattle and the L.A. airport. It took the CIA six months to tell us about it in L.A.

HPR: How constraining is the city government to its executive? Is there an example of a time where you’ve circumvented the city bureaucracy and used your executive authority to make a decision but regretted doing it?

RR: No. If what you’re doing is morally and ethically proper and people are going to see it that way, then the people can’t complain. I ran the whole city and the area in the earthquake. I related to President Clinton and to all the secretary people from Washington that came out to Sacramento, and yet, I had zero power under the state constitution, because under the state constitution, in emergencies, the county had total power over the city. But nobody from the county ever complained.

What you need is a leader at the top who sets a culture of empowering people below them. You don’t want to be principal of a school where you have no power to fire teachers who are incompetent, where you have no power over the budget, or where you have no power to fix toilets. But if you were empowered to do all those things, then you’d jump at getting that job. And the same goes for government.