Gubernatorial candidate Bill McBride isn't the only one focused on education, but his plan for reform is more productive than the lip service offered by the governor and Legislature.

Since last fall, voters in four counties -- the latest Sarasota and Manatee -- have voted to raise or extend local taxes for the sake of their schools. Commendable as that was, they shouldn't have had to do it. Our Constitution obliges the state to provide, as "a paramount duty," for a "uniform, efficient, safe, secure and high quality system of free public schools." As it had become obvious, however, that Gov. Jeb Bush and a majority of the Legislature intend only lip service to that, the local voters saw no choice but to take on additional burdens themselves.

As this year's election campaigns take shape, Florida voters will have other ways to express the frustration that recently found overwhelming voice at the largely Republican polling places of Manatee and Sarasota. Education is already the paramount campaign issue of 2002. Bush tacitly concedes as much by filming campaign ads at schools and in claiming credit for a purported $1.1-billion spending increase. In real terms, however, the new budget means only a 2 percent improvement at the classroom level. That won't stop the flight of Florida teachers to states such as Georgia that take education more seriously or help recruit the 162,000 new teachers that Florida will need over the ensuing decade. It shouldn't satisfy the voters, either.

On the other hand, there is the serious public school reform proposal that Democratic gubernatorial candidate Bill McBride detailed last week. Having said previously that he would raise state taxes for education, McBride has now specified where the money would go and how he intends to raise it.

The major elements include a $2,500 teacher pay increase, to $40,324 on average, that would still leave Florida beneath the national average but ahead, finally, of three key competitor states: Virginia, Texas and Alabama. McBride said his longer-term goal is a teacher salary equal or better than the national average, and he would put $100-million more a year toward school construction bonds. He proposes $300-million, replacing and tripling funds vetoed by Bush, for smaller class sizes in kindergarten through third grade and in schools with many at-risk students.

Florida's controversial and increasingly unpopular testing program would be refocused to a proper purpose, that of identifying individual students who need more help, rather than to punish or reward their schools. McBride calls the misuse of the FCAT program "the worst thing that's hit Florida public schools in my lifetime," and he is right.

He would also restore responsibility for pre-kindergarten programs to the Department of Education along with quality standards the Legislature and Bush repealed when they unwisely moved pre-K to the Agency for Workforce Innovation. The move cast pre-K as a welfare-to-work issue rather than the foundation for learning that it needs to be. McBride also calls for more than doubling the state's pre-K budget, to $250-million, and says voluntary pre-kindergarten enrollment should eventually be available to all Florida children.

Not since Bob Graham's days in Tallahassee has a governor, or a candidate for governor, put this much emphasis on education. Many politicians envy Graham's popularity with the public, but too few appear to recall how he earned it. For 2002, McBride has laid down a challenge that every candidate for every office should be prepared to meet: If not this plan, what would be better?

That goes for the financing as well. Some may question McBride's chances of raising $565-million from a 50-cent a pack cigarette tax increase or repealing $101-million in the particularly glaring sales tax exemptions he singled out, and they may wonder how he would extract greater economies, totaling another $442-million from other parts of the budget, than Bush or the Legislature have been able or willing to do. Yes, it would be difficult to obtain any taxes from this Legislature, or any significant savings in so-called "turkeys" and better management practices. Repealing the outrageous $50-million corporate tax credit for private school contributions would be a tough sell, too.

But it's not this Legislature that would confront McBride's plan. It's the one whose members would have been chosen in the same election that gave him a mandate to do what he's talking about. Only the most foolish among them, or the most arrogant, could fail to get that message.

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