‘Civic literacy’ amendment is a poison pill

Nobody cares more about civics education and involvement than former Florida Governor Bob Graham does.

He’s the author of a book on the subject and the founder of a center for public service at the University of Florida. He knows it’s an important issue that needs more attention in our schools. Abundant studies show that most Americans do not understand such core principles as the supremacy of the Constitution and the rule of law. In one disconcerting survey, nearly 10 percent of college graduates thought that television’s Judge Judy sat on the Supreme Court.

But Graham isn’t cheering for a proposed constitutional amendment to require the Legislature to promote “civic literacy” in Florida. He plans to vote against it in November because it’s tied to something he deplores.

The amendment, put on the November ballot by the Florida Constitution Revision Commission, would also enable the state to approve charter schools without the participation or consent of county school boards, which could not supervise them.

“I’m going to end up voting against an amendment that I feel strongly about because it’s surrounded by what I think is bad policy,” Graham told the Sarasota HeraldTribune during an interview last week.

The charter school scheme is bad policy in two ways.

• It shatters the present constitutional requirement for a uniform system of public schools. That’s for the benefit of the professional management companies that are lining up at the public purse in the guise of “competition.” Dissenting commissioner Hank Coxe, a former president of the Florida Bar, has said it would “abolish public education” in this state.

• It couples that drastic upheaval with items that have nothing to do with it except to fall under the general heading of “education.” That particular amendment also imposes term limits on school boards.

Moreover, “civic literacy” — a sugarcoating on a poison pill — doesn’t need to be in the Constitution. Florida laws already extensively spell out the fundamentals of citizenship that students are to be taught. Whether students are actually learning them is a separate question that’s beyond the purview of any constitution.

Another package of proposals, equally insidious, would override the voter-approved home rule charters of eight counties to magnify the political power of sheriffs and certain other constitutional officers. The wrapping on that poison pill calls for a Department of Veterans Affairs and an office on domestic terrorism, both of which already exist. Neither has any link to county charters, other than that they all deal with government.

These and other examples of the commission’s logrolling — or “bundling,” as its leaders prefer to call it — are unacceptable attempts to box voters into swallowing proposals they may not like to get those they do.

In a guest column the Sun Sentinel printed Thursday, Brecht Heuchan, who chaired the commission committee that put these proposals together, asserted precedents for the controversial bundling. Both previous commissions, in 1978 and 1998, “grouped ideas and did so with more regularity than we did,” he wrote.

But the record of the 1978 commission doesn’t serve Heuchan’s argument very well. All eight of its amendments failed at the polls, largely because it had proposed to abolish the elected Cabinet and because a controversial casino gambling initiative shared the ballot. Notably, the Cabinet issue wasn’t bundled with anything else.

The most conspicuous example of bundling by the 1978 commission paired major tax breaks for businesses like the Daytona Speedway which leased public property with small concessions for mobile home owners. The voters turned that down. A gun control proposal stood alone.

Heuchan mentioned the present commission’s “widely popular proposals,” including term limits for school board members, a strong ethics code, rights for crime victims and an end to greyhound racing in Florida.

Significantly, the ethics code and the racing ban stand alone on the November ballot — as they should. The assault on home rule charters and the dismemberment of Florida’s uniform public school system should stand alone also. Neither is on Heuchan’s “wildly popular” list.

One of the core principles of civic literacy is that a state constitution should deal only with the basic structure of government and the inalienable rights of the people. The commission’s amendments are stuffed with details — some good, some bad — that don’t belong in the Constitution and should be left to the Legislature.

Bob Graham is right. The cause of civic literacy will be stronger, not weaker, if voters set a good example by voting down the commission’s bad ones.