Buckley's counter reform

Assembly Speaker Barbara Buckley doesn’t like Governor Gibbons’ education proposals. Fortunately, she has come up with a few ideas of her own.

In her letter she proposes several ideas, including creating pay-for-performance, a rainy day fund, and expanding charter schools and empowerment schools . These are excellent ideas and should gain traction with both parties.

However, Buckley also returns to the tired mantra of claiming that Nevada ranks 47th in per-pupil spending. Those rankings are meaningless for good reasons. For one, Nevada’s education spending rank is anywhere from 26th to 47th – it all depends on what is included in the calculation. The most important reason why spending rankings don’t matter is that spending is not correlated with student achievement.

So is our goal to spend more money, or to improve education?

Other than that, if Speaker Buckley wants to expand all-day kindergarten, let's see some empirical research highlighting the long-term benefits of the program in Nevada. Resources are limited, and we need to ensure we are prioritizing budgets in a way that provides Nevadans the biggest bang for their buck – not just throwing money at education because it provides political constituents a job.