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A Times Editorial
Some of the leaders of Florida's reorganized public education system seem hostile to the students and educators they should be representing.
© St. Petersburg Times, published August 26, 2001
Jim Horne and Phil Handy, the top two officials in Florida's reorganized education bureaucracy, often fall back on lingo better suited to business-school seminars or strategic-arms limitation talks than to Florida's classrooms. Schools and universities are "delivery systems" to them. Students are "in the pipeline."
For the most part, though, Horne, the new secretary of education, and Handy, chairman of the new state Board of Education, articulate principles that are hard to argue with. For example, developing a coordinated education budget from kindergarten through graduate school obviously is more rational than forcing leaders of our public schools, community colleges and universities to compete among themselves for inadequate funding. And finding new ways to reward good teachers is a goal no one (except for mediocre teachers) could oppose.
Still, Florida's radically reorganized education system will be judged on results, not rhetoric. Handy says the system should expect budget increases in "the low single digits" for the foreseeable future. That's not enough money to keep pace with inflation and population growth, much less cultivate and reward a new generation of top educators.
The new board approved a recommended budget Wednesday that offers only a 3 percent increase in per-student spending for public schools and 4.4 percent per-student for universities. The budget does include a commendable increase in need-based financial aid for community college and university students, but the board in general seemed more concerned with meeting the expectations of legislative budget writers than those of educators.
State education leaders never liked the process of wrangling among themselves for Tallahassee funding; it was a system created by the Legislature to dilute the clout of our public schools and universities. Yet the new structure gives legislators even more power by eliminating the Board of Regents and other buffers to political meddling. The "seamless" budget process Horne and Handy envision sounds good -- until listeners remember that lawmakers may be freer than ever to embroider (or unravel) the education budget.
Budgets aside, the new Board of Education is off to a bad start in fulfilling another of its most important duties: serving as an advocate for public education in Florida. Horne, Handy, Gov. Jeb Bush and the other architects of this reorganization won't accomplish anything positive until they overcome the perception within the education community, and among much of the general public, that these changes are being motivated by an ideological hostility to public education. Yet Tuesday's board meeting in Tampa only fueled that perception. Handy lectured several university leaders and questioned the honesty of their accounting. Some other board members continue to be harshly critical of the public education system they now oversee. Horne deserves credit for getting off to a good start in preparing himself for his broad responsibilities, but some board members wear their ignorance of the system like a crown.
Handy complains that leaders of Florida's teachers union aren't playing a constructive role in the reorganization process. Yet Handy and Bush closed out teachers' representatives -- and public university leaders -- from the task force that set these changes in motion. For his part, Horne was a Republican legislative leader last spring when lawmakers sneaked in a budget provision apparently intended to punish the teachers union for its political activity on behalf of its members.
It's much too early to begin judging the results of this radical reorganization of public education in Florida. But Handy and Horne are kidding themselves if they really believe that new strategic plans, guiding principles, rewritten codes and other exercises in reinventing the wheel are all that is needed to bring about dramatically positive results from our kindergartens to our graduate schools.
What Florida's students and educators need most is genuine support -- political, financial, moral and otherwise -- from those in charge of state policy. The leaders of this brave new system haven't even begun to show that they're willing and able to provide it.