The new state Board of Education has come up with a business plan to revamp the system, only the board forgot to ask the people who know what works, the educators.

In its quest to operate Florida public education like a business, the new state Board of Education is following a particularly well-worn corporate path: Reorganize, add new layers of highly paid executives, move swiftly and secretly, and don't bother asking the people who actually do the work. At the board's inaugural meeting this week, all four business strategies were on fabulous display:

Reorganize. Gov. Jeb Bush now has his wish. The state has become the first in the nation to collapse all its education levels -- K-12, community colleges and universities -- into one system that answers to the governor. Most peculiar, however, is its decision to give equal organizational stature to "independent education," since none of those institutions can be held accountable for their work. The state will hire a chancellor to be in charge of educational institutions, such as private schools and home schools, that by definition don't want any government oversight.

New well-paid executives. The state will now have an education secretary, an education commissioner, a chief of staff, and four chancellors. The board jumped into high executive gear with new Secretary Jim Horne, a state senator with no previous administrative or professional education experience, by awarding him a pay package potentially worth $400,000 annually. Board member Charles Garcia, a Boca Raton investment banker, almost burst with pride, proclaiming: "I want our state to be known as the state that pays not the comparable salary, but the highest salary." Never mind that the starting pay for Florida teachers ranks 34th in the nation.

Swift and secret movement. As is often the case with Bush initiatives, the gas pedal is pushed to floor and the driver seems unconcerned with road signs or road kill. By next month, Horne says he will present the state's first consolidated education budget proposal, linking all three systems into one and determining each of their relative budget priorities. By December, he says he will have reorganized the entire Department of Education and will have completely rewritten the 5,000-page Florida School Code. The board moved so quickly in its first meeting that only a day later, chairman Phil Handy was trying to tell reporters that board members had changed their mind about Horne's salary package and wanted to delay the bonuses. That may be a smart move, but the state Sunshine law prohibits the board from making such a decision in secret. This is public education.

Ignoring educators. The bill that abolished the university regents and reorganized state education was first sketched on a cocktail napkin by Bush and former House Speaker John Thrasher, and they were unmoved by by the fact that almost every knowledgeable education observer opposed it. Bush then gave education professionals only token representation on the university boards he appointed. So it may come as no real surprise that an Education Board led by Handy would ignore the advice of teachers and professors and education administrators. Interestingly enough, however, in their first meeting, some of the Education Board's own members -- all picked by Bush -- expressed dismay that even they were being left out of the loop. When told that separate "working groups" would reorganize DOE and rewrite the School Code, board member Linda Eads, a former teacher and school administrator, asked: "Who, specifically, is on this working group?"

This new "seamless" system may yet actually work someday, but not until the corporate executives who were picked to run it understand that the basic work of education lies inside the classroom, where learning depends on a qualified teacher being able to interact with an eager student. Reorganization and extra layers of management may seem manifest to those who measure the worth of businesses by the size of the paycheck their CEO draws, but this revolution will only help students if it can deal with children who come from broken homes and teachers who are being asked to accomplish too much with too little.

Those who are now in charge and who are so full of certitude and so contemptuous of the "educational establishment" need at some point to recognize that teachers on the front lines do have a sense for what is going right and what is going wrong. Florida education is not suffering from lack of a CEO incentive pay plan so much as it is suffering from a lack of political will.

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