Phil Handy, chairman of the state board of education and therefore Horne's boss, is a big-picture deal maker and businessman -- and the Oscar to Horne's Felix. Like many entrepreneurs, Handy can be impatient and intolerant with those slow to worship at the altar of his perceived wisdom. He is also earnest, very smart and he has a clear vision for how education ought to work and the drive to push it in that direction.
The two share a philosophy and vocabulary that frames kindergarten-through-college education, sometimes clunkily, as a "delivery system" that needs to be "seamless'' and "articulated.'' They speak about "incenting'' cooperation and coordination among administrators at various levels of the system.
Get past the jargon, however, and their priorities are fairly uncluttered and right to the point: Consolidate the finances, rewrite some 5,000 pages of school code and develop a plan for the whole system that begins to address critical issues like making university financial aid more need-based and heading off the tidal wave of a teacher shortage that's just beginning to lap at Florida elementary and high schools. They are absolutely right to either induce, or force, better planning between community colleges and high schools, for example, and between schools of education and the school districts that will employ teachers trained at those schools. They are right to look for ways to pay more to teachers who do more -- and are more effective.
Perhaps the trickiest course Handy-Horne must navigate is accommodating their goals of both pushing decision-making down closer to the local level ("devolution,'' in Horne-Handy-speak) and increasing accountability. Presumably, the new "devolved'' system -- in which each university has its own corporate-style board of directors and local K-12 systems plan in concert with their local community colleges -- should foster innovation. But if the Horne-Handy board of ed ends up dropping a massively detailed set of desired outcomes on the system -- or if the Legislature tinkers -- their "accountability'' will quickly become someone else's bureaucratic albatross.
And local K-12 districts, even as they whine, will eagerly embrace every rule and regulation the new system offers. It's not willful incompetence; it's self-defense: The state and society have dumped so many tasks on schools that we have conditioned educators to define success in terms of filling out the right forms rather than figuring out whether children are learning anything. The man in charge of school-building for one of the state's biggest counties confided to me recently that the mechanism for getting a school built is so complex that he is still confused about how to do his job properly -- after a decade on the job. The hornet's nest of regulations and restrictions that befuddles him is simply the aggregation of a lot of previous ideas about "accountability,'' and Horne-Handy will need to take care not to reinvent a warped wheel.
There are other issues. The new system, if seamless, nonetheless creates teams of high-powered, high-profile champions for community colleges and universities in the form of their newly named boards of directors. The K-12 swatch of the seamless system -- the piece most in need of improvement -- will still depend for leadership on school boards with considerably less horsepower. Elementary schools, alas, don't play Division I football or hire busloads of lobbyists.
And the Handy-Horne duo is not without its weaknesses and blind spots. There are whispers of a power struggle between the two, who, like Oscar and Felix, clearly are not always comfortable with the other's style.
There is also what I'd call the empathy factor. Lt. Gov. Frank Brogan is a dazzlingly effective advocate for educational reform. He can criticize specifics of the status quo -- and push controversial change -- and yet no audience will ever doubt that he is a man who cares passionately about the young people who are learning in Florida's schools and the instructors who teach them.
Horne-Handy aren't good yet at communicating their regard for education along with their determination to fix it, and it's important that they master that skill -- and win the trust of the teachers and administrators who are the real detail people in education reform. In the mid-1980s, Tennessee Gov. Lamar Alexander got voters in that state to pump $1 billion in new spending into education. He gave a bigger one-time raise to every teacher than the teachers unions ever won for them, put computers into every seventh- and eighth-grade classroom for the first time, and established, also for the first time, baseline standards for reading and math in grades K-8. Much of the momentum for reform withered, however, because the rank and file never believed Alexander respected them, their jobs and why they did them -- even though his own mother was a public school teacher. There's a lesson there for Horne-Handy.
One example: From a big-picture perspective, Handy is right when he says that it's a myth that there's not enough money to do the job of educating Florida's children. At the micro level, however, that's awfully tough to hear when you're a $35,000-a-year teacher shelling out hundreds of dollars a year for supplies for your students because the district won't or can't pay for them.
Florida needs a hit show from its odd couple, so have at it, Oscar and Felix. You're right that education is in some respects a "delivery system'' that will respond to market forces and a more businesslike approach to management. But it's a lot more. In being tough and businesslike in whipping the system into shape, you also need to communicate that you're doing it for the kids and teachers rather than to them.