Closing the door on parental involvement

The public education establishment often blames parents for its troubles, claiming that more parental involvement is needed to improve student achievement. But the Clark County School District, like so many school districts, likes to hide behind closed doors.

The Superintendent's Educational Opportunities Advisory Committee - which was set up to advise the superintendent regarding low-performing, low-income, primarily minority schools - has met twice this month without advertising its meetings or agenda to the public. This is a direct violation of Nevada's open-meeting laws.

"Parents of children attending 'troubled schools' and the public have a vested interest in attending these meetings," Maggy McLetchie, staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union of Nevada, said in article published by the Las Vegas Review-Journal. "Not advertising the meetings would seem to contradict the district's often-stated goal of increasing parental involvement."

Read the rest of the Review-Journal article, titled District panel breaks law: Superintendent says open meeting rules do not apply.

More news on empowerment schools

Overtly, at least, the [empowerment school] law had strong bipartisan support. "The decision-making will be initiated by local stakeholders in the school, not central administration or state agencies," said then-Senate Minority Leader Steven Horsford (D).

Unfortunately for Nevada students, teachers and taxpayers, the law's provisions have often been largely ignored by state and local agencies. The Nevada State Department of Education told the Washoe district it need not obey the law after budget cuts reduced planned empowerment school funding. In reality, compliance with the law was not conditional upon additional resources.

As one empowerment principal noted, "Empowerment is not about the extra money, it is about moving decision-making to the local level." Sen. Horsford agrees. "You can do empowerment without more money," he told teachers and principals at a recent conference. "You can do empowerment by giving the flexibility to the schools, principals and teachers."

Read "Financing Entrepreneurial Education: Part VI: Compliance with and nose-thumbing at Nevada’s empowerment law" here.

Florida ranked eighth-best in the nation

Florida has been ranked eighth-best in the nation for public education, according to the Education Week report "Quality Counts." This is a big improvement for Florida, which ranked 14th last year. The results are a tremendous testament to the education reforms implemented a decade ago.

What is most impressive about Florida is that it has enjoyed high levels of student achievement at a relatively modest cost. And unlike many high-achieving states, Florida is a state with a majority-minority student population, like Nevada.

The Ed Week report is not without its flaws, however. For example, it appears to rank schools, in part, based on spending. We all know now that spending does not necessarily produce results. The report also gives weight to policies that have yet to prove effective - like the percentage of students enrolled in preschool. The report also gives extra weight to parental income, parents having college degrees, and other factors that cannot be controlled by public education. Although “Quality Counts” is the name of the report, it grades far more than just quality, skewing the comparison in favor of white, wealthy states. Still, Florida does quite well.


Nevada scored 50th, just ahead of D.C.

Virtual schools

Virtual schools allow greater flexibility for student athletes. Watch this three minute video from Education Next to learn more.

Hey, ho, collective bargaining has got to go!

Governor Gibbons has proposed eliminating collective bargaining for teachers. This idea, if not vouchers (also hated by unions), may be his most controversial proposal. Predictably the Las Vegas Sun, among others, opposes this idea on the grounds that it would hurt the state’s ability to attract new teachers, asserting:

Part of the problem in education is that the schools have not been able to attract and retain top candidates because teaching jobs, which require extensive education credentials, don’t pay well. Teachers should be held accountable — and bad teachers have no place in a classroom — but we also believe they should be paid like the professionals they are with the heavy responsibility they carry.

On the contrary, it is collective bargaining that seriously hurts the state's ability to attract high-quality teachers. More importantly, collective bargaining has hurt students.

First, unions have negotiated costly certification procedures which keep out qualified adults. Unions (and union-sponsored legislators) have worked very hard to keep programs out of Nevada that would assist professional individuals become teachers. These stringent certification laws reduce the state’s pool of teaching applicants. Additionally, Nevada’s certification laws most likely also reduce the number of qualified minority applicants.

Second, unions have negotiated pay schedules that keep out highly qualified young persons and highly qualified transitioning professions by requiring such candidates to start at or near the bottom and then spend many years working their way up the pay scale.

Third, unions protect mediocrity through the tenure rules they’ve negotiated. Nevada's teachers can earn tenure in one to two years and after that it becomes very difficult to fire poor performers. When parents complain about really bad teachers, the teachers aren’t let go, they are moved to schools where parents are less likely to complain — often schools in low-income, high-minority areas. Thus seniority and tenure create a situation where the kids who need the most help are most likely to be taught by the worst teachers.

Collective bargaining should be eliminated to open the door for alternative teacher certification, merit pay and the ability to fire terrible teachers. At the very least, public employee unions should be restricted to negating salaries only.

Nevada’s teachers are adult professionals (ranking 19th best paid in the nation by the National Education Association), not migrant laborers or factory workers exposed to harsh working conditions. Union representation is costly and unnecessary in a 21st century white-collar working environment.

No head start from Head Start

*The U.S. government has spent about $100 billion on Head Start since 1965. The results could have been duplicated by simply burning $100 billion in cash.


Health and Human Services finally released the report on Head Start, the pre-school program for low-income students. The report shows, as many predicted, that Head Start has no lasting benefits on students' learning abilities.

Dr. Jay P. Greene states,

The study used a gold-standard, random assignment design and had a very large nationally representative sample. This was a well done study (even if it mysteriously took more than 3 years after data collection was complete to release the results).

For students who were randomly assigned to Head Start or not at the age of 4, the researchers collected 19 measures of cognitive impacts at the end of kindergarten and 22 measures when those students finished 1st grade. Of those 41 measures only 1 was significant and positive. The remaining 40 showed no statistically significant difference. The one significant effect was for receptive vocabulary, which showed no significant advantage for Head Start students after kindergarten but somehow re-emerged at the end of 1st grade.

Dr. Greene concludes that "The long and short of it is that the government has a giant and enormously expensive pre-school program that has made basically no difference for the students who participate in it."

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.

Education Fast Facts

Here are some fast facts on education spending and student achievement in Nevada and abroad. We will post the latest data once it is made available.

• Higher Education Graduation Rates


• Higher Education Spending


• K-12 Education in Nevada

PC never died

In 1957 the U.S. Supreme Court said of the nation’s colleges, “Teachers and students must always remain free to inquire, to study and to evaluate, to gain new maturity and understanding; otherwise our civilization will stagnate and die.”

However, since the 1980s American colleges have suffered under the bizarre and Orwellian thought police known as “Political Correctness.” Today universities censor students and professors on both the right and the left. If someone is offended, you lose the right to speak your mind – in some cases you lose the right to simply hold a perception (or a thought).

The censorship is almost always patently absurd. In 2007, a student was found guilty of “openly reading [a] book related to a historically and racially abhorrent subject.” The student was reading a history book, Notre Dame vs. the Klan, focused on a street fight that took place between students and the Ku Klux Klan in 1924.

Remember UNLV’s dropped PC code that would have allowed people to call the campus police because of "bias"? The proposed code banned,

“verbal, written, or physical acts of intimidation, coercion, interference, frivolous claims, discrimination, and sexual or other harassment motivated, in whole or in part, by bias based on actual or perceived race, ethnicity, color, religion, creed, sex (including gender identity or expression, or a pregnancy related condition), sexual orientation, national origin, military status or military obligations, disability (including veterans with service-connected disabilities), age, marital status, physical appearance, political affiliation, or on the basis of exercise of rights secured by the First Amendment of the United States Constitution.”

(emphasis mine).

Vague speech codes and tiny out-of-the-way “free speech zones” are a direct violation of free speech in America. These policies allow universities to easily destroy whatever the administration does not like. In simple English, that is called “bullying.”

Want to form a club for students wishing to overturn the ban on concealed handguns on campus at Community College of Allegheny County, in Pittsburgh? Sorry, you’re banned from handing out your pamphlets.

Want to protest the construction of a school parking garage at Valdosta State University because of its harmful effects on the environment? Sorry, you’ve been expelled from school.

Want to protest budget cuts with your students at Southwestern College in California? Those professors were outside the free speech zone and were thus banned from the campus.

The authoritarian lessons learned by students from political correctness are simple – if you don’t like what your rivals say, you have the right to censor their ability to oppose your own position.

Read “PC Never Died” by George Lukianoff, the president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education.

Hiding and manipulating education data?

Is the government manipulating education research again? President Obama wants to spend another $10 billion on early childhood programs like Head Start - a preschool program for low-income students. However, the U.S. government has yet to release a report highlighting the results of this program. The results are worth knowing; after all, $10 billion is a lot of money.

Since the data collection on Head Start was completed about four years ago, Dr. Jay P. Greene of the University of Arkansas believes that burying or manipulating education data might be one reason why we haven't seen the study.

According to Dan Lips of the Heritage Foundation, since the program's inception in 1965, the U.S. has spent over $100 billion providing pre-school for low-income students. But according to briefs and political insiders related to the buried and unreleased federal report, the program has no lasting gains for students. The data collection for the federally mandated report was completed in 2006 and the report itself was supposed to be released in March of 2009.

This seems very similar to last year’s education fiasco as the Obama administration attempted to secretly leak the promising results of the D.C. voucher program on a Friday afternoon – months AFTER Democrats had voted to all but kill the program.

More teachers, lower costs?

Dava Saba of the American Board for Certification of Teacher Excellence (ABCTE) has an excellent post poking fun of public university presidents who have committed to add 10,000 new math teachers by 2015.

Saba breaks down the math to reveal that this is a measly six new math teachers per university, per year. He points out that ABCTE (an alternative pathway to teacher certification) added 219 new math teachers last year - 75 more than the year before. The only things holding ABCTE back is restrictive state laws which prohibit these alternative programs. So what is the university’s excuse?

Btw, Saba's progam helps adults become teachers for less than $1,000 - just 5% of the cost of attending the average public university.

What is the holdup with alternative teacher certification in Nevada?

Education reform in 2010?

Governor Gibbons’ plan to improve education is on the right track. Many education experts now recognize that school districts’ priorities are out of whack — too focused on complying with often contradictory laws, rules and regulations coming from the feds and the state, on launching more programs and on creating jobs for adults. (Check out the more than 30 reports on this subject from the non-partisan Center for Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington.)

To help eliminate state-level mandates and decentralize control of schools, the governor proposes two big changes. One eliminates mandates that districts must use certain money only for class-size reduction and full-time kindergarten. Basically, the plan is to give at least some of the money back to the school districts to use as they please with no legislative requirements on how to spend the money.

Watch out for political spin as opponents (and misguided journalists) report this as an attempt to eliminate the programs altogether. Actually, if we did eliminate the programs, the state would save about $350 million a biennium with no ill effects on the children.

Here is why:

• Class-size reduction merely reduces the ratio of students to teachers, not necessarily the size of classes.



• Class-size reduction can have modest benefits — but only when good teachers are in the classroom. Think about it. If your child has a great teacher, getting more personal attention for your student is good. But if the teacher is mediocre, or even bad, the personal attention won’t matter.



• The effectiveness of teachers is the overriding issue. Research has established that highly effective teachers are 10 to 20 times more effective than small class sizes. Thus, if Nevada had a way of identifying and rewarding great teachers, we could have larger class sizes and higher student achievement at the same time.



• Nevada, however, lacks any systematic way of identifying good teachers — such as the meaningful teacher evaluations that use student-testing data. And because districts lie down before teacher-union bosses and refuse to give superior teachers superior pay, class-size reduction only increases the likelihood that your children are exposed to teachers who are mediocre (or worse).



• Nevada’s teacher certification laws also make it difficult to hire great teachers. Not only does the state lack an alternative certification program that would allow professionals to switch to teaching without returning to college, but state law even prohibits school districts from hiring college professors unless they’ve been certified to teach K-12. No certification is required to teach college students. See a problem?

Great teachers matter

Great teachers matter - Teach for America knows this, and that is why they carefully sort all the data they collect on their teachers. They use the data to recruit and train the next batch of teachers. If the non-profit Teach for America can do this, why can't Nevada?

Read this great article in the Atlantic, "What Makes a Great Teacher?"

Jobs for adults, not education for children?

Public education — where all is supposedly "for the children" — has a dirty secret: Its real organizing principle is jobs for adults.

The Clark County School District employs one adult for every eight students. In Washoe County, it's one adult for every 7.2 students. And don't assume those adults are teachers: Fewer than one of three Clark County School District employees are classroom teachers.

No, district administrators always like to hire ... more administrators. That's one of the reasons why — absent fundamental reform — public education continues putting adults ahead of students

Read the latest NPRI article on empowerment schools here "Financing Entrepreneurial Education: Part III"

Charter school myths

A new report by the Pioneer Institute highlights several popular myths about charter schools (privately run public schools). Some of these myths state that charter schools drain resources from traditional public schools, that they are more expensive and less effective. Read “Debunking Myths About Charter Public Schools” to learn more about these myths.