Elected education commissioner will get us only so far

Ten new voter initiative petitions have been filed in Tallahassee this year despite the Legislature’s heavy-handed attempt to prevent them with targeted campaign contribution limits. The range of issues illustrates why politicians and their corporate sponsors so greatly fear this method of popular democracy.

Among the causes presented: Election-day voter registration, absolute protections for wildlife and Florida waters, an effective ban on new toll roads, and ranked-choice voting in general elections, which would encourage third-party candidacies but likely keep them from becoming mere spoilers.

There’s also a revival of Florida’s longest-running political debate over having an elected Cabinet, which was shrunk in 1998 from six members to three with the governor holding the fourth vote as chair.

This proposal would make the education commissioner an elected member of the Cabinet again instead of being appointed by a board of education that the governor appoints and controls. Richard Corcoran, a former House speaker, is the incumbent — and controversial — commissioner.

Fort Lauderdale City Commissioner Ben Sorensen chairs the “Let Florida Vote” committee sponsoring the initiative, which would go on the ballot as the “Cabinet Reorganization Amendment; Commissioner of Education.”

“Having the education commissioner being elected by the people ensures a greater deal of accountability and greater vetting by the people of Florida,” Sorensen said in a telephone interview. “I’m always looking for better education in our state. My kids are 7 and 4 now, so they’re going to be in the public school system for years. I want to make sure parents have a real say. We need a subject matter expert.”

That argument has also been made unsuccessfully in the Legislature. However, the initiative process was created precisely to let the people do what the Legislature won’t. The question, though, is whether it would result in what Sorensen wants. For one thing, the text doesn’t require the officeholder to have any experience in education administration.

There’s little doubt, though, that the people would vote for an elected commissioner if Sorensen can get the nearly 900,000 necessary voter signatures to put it on the 2024 ballot.

The education records of Gov. Ron DeSantis and his protégé Corcoran are exhibits A and B in a plausible case for electing the commissioner. They have worked in tandem to fund more private school enrollments at the expense of public schools, and to keep any realistic mention of slavery or racism out of the public school civics curriculum. The public schools should be in the care of people who truly care about the education of the public, not men like DeSantis and Corcoran.

But the surer and sooner way to achieve that is to elect a better governor. The first elected commissioner would not take office, under the amendment’s terms, until January 2027.

Moreover, there’s no guarantee that the elected commissioner would favor the public schools or have any experience relevant to running them. If he or she became crosswise with the governor over education policy, the governor would still dominate the outcome because of the veto power and his or her control of the state budget. That was one of the main reasons for eliminating the elected position in 1998.

Then there’s the question of the money to run a successful statewide campaign. We would have more confidence in Sorensen’s proposal if it simply put an elected commissioner back in charge of education rather than go on to restore the position to the Cabinet, with voting powers over natural resources, state lands, highway safety, law enforcement, revenue collection, bond finance and clemency. Education should be a full-time responsibility. Moreover, those unrelated responsibilities would attract the attention and, likely, the campaign money of deep-pocket special interests.

Only 12 states, mostly in the South and West, elect a chief state school officer. In California, the largest, the office is nonpartisan.

Florida history is pertinent. In a bitter reaction to Reconstruction, which gave Florida its first public schools, former Confederates set out to make the government as weak as possible, including forcing the governor to share his authority with six peers who often fancied becoming governor themselves. Over time, the Legislature added more and more collective functions to this form of government by committee, which Florida swiftly outgrew. No state diffused executive authority as much as Florida did, and accountability was lacking.

Democrat LeRoy Collins (1955-61) was the first governor to try to break that system, followed by Republican Claude R. Kirk Jr. (1967-71) and Democrat Reubin Askew (1971-79). Under Govs. Rick Scott and DeSantis, the remaining Cabinet officers have been rubber stamps, excepting only Democrat Nikki Fried, the commissioner of agriculture, whose minority voice doesn’t prevail on Republican ears. Attorney General Ashley Moody and Chief Financial Officer Jimmy Patronis might as well be DeSantis appointees because they never stand up to him.

With or without an elected education commissioner, the governor will still control K-12 and higher education. That is the election that matters.