Leadership Quote by Roy Romer

Romer’s line reads like a polite tour of a showroom: look at this “market,” note the “product,” admire the “accountability,” appreciate the “price.” That vocabulary is the point. A career politician and former public-education leader, he’s signaling a willingness to translate schooling into the language that dominates late-20th-century governance: efficiency, metrics, consumer choice. It’s not quite endorsement, not quite warning. “Intriguing” is the safe word that lets him lean toward privatization without owning its consequences.

The subtext is a critique of the traditional public system that can’t be spoken too bluntly: if Phoenix is “trying” to deliver education with “more accountability,” then someone else is failing to. Accountability here is less about intellectual rigor than about measurable outputs: completion rates, job placement, standardized learning objectives. It’s the managerial imagination at work, treating education as a service with deliverables rather than a civic institution with messy, long-term aims.

Context matters: proprietary colleges rose by targeting working adults priced out of time and flexibility, offering night classes, online modules, and an unmistakably transactional promise. Romer’s phrasing acknowledges that demand while tiptoeing around the darker reality that later defined the sector: aggressive recruitment, heavy debt loads, and claims of value that didn’t always cash out.

What makes the quote effective is its quiet reframing. By calling students a “market” and degrees a “product,” it normalizes the idea that education’s legitimacy comes from consumer logic. The sentence doesn’t argue; it re-labels. That’s how policy shifts happen: not through a grand speech, but through a new set of nouns.