Opinion: Bush's game of catch-up

With new plans to build classrooms and give more incentives to teachers, the governor is making promises that run counter to his own education agenda until now.

With tepid new offers of more classrooms and better teacher pay, Gov. Jeb Bush is no longer running just against Tampa attorney Bill McBride. He's running for re-election against his own record.

The "Classrooms for Kids" plan, announced last week, is actually only an offer to borrow $2.8-billion to build new schools. It doesn't address how to hire teachers to work in them. The teacher pay plan is even more vague, so far amounting to Education Secretary Jim Horne's recent statement that he may soon propose for the state to reach the national average in five years. Bush didn't mention such a goal Wednesday during his announcement of yet another new plan, this one to retain teachers.

The fact that the plans lack substance, though, is less noteworthy than the fact that they run so counter to Bush's own agenda as governor until now. In the past four years, Bush has produced three major changes in public education: 1) using the FCAT test to grade every school in the state; 2) making Florida the top state nationally for school vouchers and privatization; 3) restructuring the entire education governance system with appointees of his choosing. Class size and teacher pay were nowhere on his priority list.

State Sen. Kendrick Meek, D-Miami, decided to lead a campaign to place the class size issue on the Nov. 5 ballot because the governor and Legislature had refused to consider it. Bush has fought it vigorously, and not merely because class size limits would be placed in the state Constitution.

As recently as June, the governor's education secretary produced a report that he said linked high grades on the FCAT to larger class size in elementary schools. Board of Education chairman Phil Handy remarked: "There are plenty of criteria that can be identified for high-performing schools. It doesn't appear that lower class size is one of them." Is Bush now repudiating his education chairman's assertion?

Average class size and teacher pay aren't easy to improve, because they cost money, and Florida has long been cheap with education. That's why our average class sizes are the sixth largest in the nation; why our schools themselves are the nation's largest, with average high school enrollments at double the national average; why teacher pay is 29th, $5,100 below the national average.

As governor, Bush has promoted a different philosophy. He says he wants to focus on "outcomes" and test results. He has criticized those who push for higher pay or smaller classes as being obsessed with "inputs," meaning spending. Handy, the Winter Park financier and campaign fundraiser the governor chose to lead Florida's education policy, has been even more blunt. "It's annoying to me that we always spend our time talking about money, at least in the context of more money," Handy said earlier this year. ". . . We need to do more with what we've got."

Politically, this is the real rub for the governor: As he seeks re-election, he is running into parents and teachers who have had to deal with school cutbacks, teacher layoffs, reductions in instructional periods, increased class sizes, elimination of summer school classes. He finds people who think the FCAT is one-dimensional and argue that good schools also require more investment.

Those encounters, and the opinion polls that back them up, may explain why one of Bush's first re-election commercials bragged about how much he has spent on education, and why he is now suggesting he wants to spend more. But they also underscore the bind he is in. The bottom-line budget numbers he features in his commercials are intended to obscure the reality that voters see in their schools.

Here, from the U.S. Department of Education, is the progression that Florida's per-student spending has followed in the past four years. Before Bush was named governor: 32nd in the nation. First year as governor: 37th. Second year: 38th. Third year: 39th. Bush the Governor might be proud of that trend, but Bush the Candidate is having a hard time explaining it.

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