Copy Florida, copy Florida now!

More great news on the education front...if you live in Florida. Florida's Hispanic students now outscore Nevada's white students (223 vs. 222) on the National Assessment of Educational Progress 4th Grade Reading exam - which, I might add, is in English.

Florida continues to prove that ALL students can achieve. Nevada needs to copy what Florida has done, and quick!

Read "Faillure Is No Longer an Option" to learn more about Florida's reforms.

Nevada stagnates and Florida continues to rock

Since 1959 Nevada has increased per-pupil spending 180 percent and we still score below average on national tests. The fact is, spending more money hasn’t worked in the past, and it won’t work in the future. That is why we need serious reform.

Fortunately, we have as an example the state of Florida, which continues to prove that genuine reform works. The 2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress report shows Florida continues its march of success. Nevada? Err, not so much.

Florida’s Hispanic students now tie or best the statewide average for all students of 30 other states (including Nevada) on the NAEP fourth-grade reading exam – up from 15 states two years ago. Florida’s black students now tie or best the statewide average for all students of eight states (including Nevada), up from two states two years ago. Even Florida’s low-income students best the statewide average of all Nevada’s students and beat or tie students from 13 other states.

Is there any doubt now that education needs to be seriously overhauled?

*Florida's low-income students outscore the statewide average of all Nevada students.

*Florida's Hispanic students outscore the statewide average of all Nevada students.

*Florida's African American students tie the statewide average of all Nevada students.

Learn more about Florida's reform efforts in NPRI's report, "Failure Is No Longer an Option"

How to save our schools

Reason TV hits the road with Drew Carey to figure out what to do about Cleveland's poor-quality schools. Reason recommends school decentralization - something we've called empowerment schools here in Nevada. Under this model, school funds are given to a school once a parent chooses that school, and principals have greater autonomy over how to use those funds while teachers have more control over the classroom. The result is less micromanagement from the central office, less waste, more efficiency, happier teachers and better schools.

NPRI made the same recommendations in our recent series on empowerment schools.

Charter schools and student performance

Dr. Paul Peterson of Harvard University and the Hoover Institution has a wonderful article in the Wall Street Journal that you should read. Dr. Peterson will be one of NPRI's presenters at this week's education conference at The Orleans (tickets are still available). Learn more about NPRI's education summit, titled "Success for Every Nevada Child."

Here are some select quotes from the article. Peterson on creative destruction in education:

Twentieth century economist Joseph Schumpeter saw it another way. In his view, it is in the nature of markets that middling firms are "creatively" destroyed by good firms, which are themselves eventually eliminated by still better competitors. Ignoring this basic economic principle, critics of charter schools and other forms of school choice see no hope for competition in education. These critics ask us to leave public schools alone apart from creating voluntary national standards—speed zones without traffic tickets, as it were.

Yet few doubt that public schools today are troubled, as the president noted on Saturday. What the president left out is that the performance of American high school students has hardly budged over the past 40 years, while the per-pupil cost of operating the schools they attend has increased threefold in real dollar terms. If school districts were firms operating in the market place, many would quickly fall victim to Schumpeter's law of creative destruction.

Peterson on charter schools:

To identify the effects of a charter education, a wide variety of studies have been conducted. The best studies are randomized experiments, the gold standard in both medical and educational research. Stanford University's Caroline Hoxby and Harvard University's Thomas Kane have conducted randomized experiments that compare students who win a charter lottery with those who applied but were not given a seat. Winners and losers can be assumed to be equally motivated because they both tried to go to a charter school. Ms. Hoxby and Mr. Kane have found that lottery winners subsequently scored considerably higher on math and reading tests than did applicants who remained in district schools.

In another good study, the RAND Corp. found that charter high school graduation rates and college attendance rates were better than regular district school rates by 15 percentage points and eight percentage points respectively.

Instead of taking seriously these high quality studies, charter critics rely heavily on a report released in 2004 by the American Federation of Teachers (AFT). The AFT is hardly a disinterested investigator, and its report makes inappropriate comparisons and pays insufficient attention to the fact that charters are serving an educationally deprived segment of the population. Others base their criticism of charters on a report from an ongoing study by Stanford's Center for Research on Education Outcomes (Credo), which found that there are more weak charter schools than strong ones. Though this report is superior to AFT's study, its results are dominated by a large number of students who are in their first year at a charter school and a large number of charter schools that are in their first year of operation.

The student's 4th estate

Praise is in order for the principal of Churchill County High in Fallon, Nevada, and the county's school board for not backing down to bullying from the teacher union, which wanted to restrict a student's right to free speech.

A student at the high school wrote an article alleging that a music teacher withheld student audition tapes for a state musical competition. Unfortunatly, unions protect teachers, not students, and the union wanted to stop the article from being published.

The school district and principal disagreed and allowed the article to be published (a rare event in the hyper-sensitive public school apparatus, which has no qualms about squashing the constitutional rights of students).

So now the teacher has sued the school district. Maybe the teacher should instead take the opportunity to learn about something called integrity and salute the student for trying to keep the teacher honest.

Nevada needs more charter schools

Nevada needs more charter schools (privately operated public schools), whether they are brick-and-mortar schools or cyberschools. Beyond improving student achievement, graduation rates, and the performance of traditional public schools (through competition), charter schools are much cheaper to operate.

Unfortunately, Nevada is behind the curve. Arizona has 1,750 percent more charter schools than Nevada with a population that is just 149 percent larger. Utah, a state with a similar population size, has nearly three times as many charter schools. "Progressive" California leads the nation, with over 800 charter schools - many of which have set up in California's poorest neighborhoods, providing some greatly needed educational choice.

So how can charters lower education costs in Nevada? Nevada has the nation's third-highest level of capital expenditures and debt expenditures per pupil. Yes, we have been the fastest growing state in the nation, but Arizona has been right behind us, and Arizona's capital expenditures and debt are far lower than Nevada's.

*Source: U.S. Census Bureau
It's a good bet that charter schools play a big role in keeping costs down in Arizona. You see, charter schools don't recieve bond money to build their schools. They have to take the per-pupil funds they recieve and hire staff, buy supplies and build their schools.

For example, a charter school in Clark County will recieve about $6,386 per pupil, while the Clark County School District claims its operating budget is $7,617 per pupil. This operating budget doesn't even include capital expenditures and debt repayment, which drive Clark County's expenditures to over $10,000 per pupil.

A rapid expansion of Nevada's charter-school program could literally save us hundreds of millions of dollars in the future. In fact, the difference between Arizona's and Nevada's capital expenditures in FY 2006 (the latest data available) comes to over $300 million (and that is after adjusting for Nevada's lower student population).

Of course, for this to happen, Nevada would have to repeal some very nasty, union-sponsored, anti-charter-school rules ...

The true cost of public education

The Cato Institute examines the true cost of public education. NPRI's report "Funding Fantasies" looked at this issue in Nevada last year. We found that Nevada spent over $13,000 per pupil when all funds were included. Even if we exclude bond revenue expenditures, Nevada was still spending over $11,500 per pupil in the 2008-09 school year.

Higher education misleading people again

*Photo by Mona Shield Payne / Special to the Sun

Last week some engineering students and professors at UNLV gathered to protest budget cuts they believed would eliminate their departments. The problem is, no one actually suggested cutting engineering.

The engineering departments were listed as the most expensive, which isn’t surprising. But no one suggested that because they were expensive they should be eliminated. The university simply allowed the media, taxpayers, professors and students to draw their own connections.

Somehow, these students and teachers ended up protesting about nothing and no one bothered to clarify that for them. One of two possibilities explains why this happened. Either the engineering students and teachers need better reading comprehension skills, or the leadership at UNLV needs to have the integrity to explain the situation with some honesty, and to stop misleading and manipulating the already-worried students.

My money is on the latter possibility.

Average teacher pay in Nevada

Being a teacher isn't a half-bad job, I should know, I was a history teacher for a short time. The only problem is that you get paid based on how long you've worked, not how good you are at teaching.

Never the less, the average teacher in Nevada makes $53,547.

Don't forget about benefits

Retirement: $10,977
Workers comp: $403
Unemployment insurance: $43
Medicare: $712
Medical Insurance $6,707
Other: $286

That brings the grand total (salary plus benefits) to $72,675 for the average teacher.

Graduation rates at Nevada colleges

The board of regents of the Nevada System of Higher Education is meeting today to discuss the budget reductions. We hope they take some time to dicuss improving the quality of education and increasing graduation rates as well.

But isn’t graduating on time the student’s responsibility? Yes and no. The problem is, NSHE is trying to sell itself as an institution of learning that is not only in high demand but adds value to Nevada's economy. Thus, those who run the system argue for more state support.

But why should the state give more support when it is already hard enough to determine the value of an undergraduate degree today? Furthermore, what is the value of the majority of students attending college but not graduating? Until this is resolved, we can’t say with any certainty that NSHE adds more value than it consumes in resources.

Here is a list of the 2008 graduation, retention and transfer-out rates for Nevada’s public colleges and universities. The data comes from the National Center for Education Statistics at the U.S. Department of Education. In the data provided, we are only looking at the graduation, retention and transfer-out rates of first-time, full-time students.

University of Nevada, Las Vegas
UNLV retains 76 percent of its full-time students after the first year, yet just 41 percent of full-time students will graduate after six years of college.

*UNLV graduation rates

*UNLV graduation rates by race

University of Nevada, Reno
UNR retains 75 percent of its full-time students after the first year yet graduates just 48 percent of its students within six years.

*UNR graduation rates

UNR graduation rates by race

College of Southern Nevada:

Retention rate: Unknown
Graduation rate: 4 percent
Transfer-out rate: 37 percent

Great Basin College

Retention rate: 57 percent
Graduation rate: 20 percent
Transfer-out rate: Unknown

Nevada State College
Retention rate: 54 percent
Graduation rate: 13 percent
Transfer-out rate: Unknown

Truckee Meadows

Retention rate: 61 percent
Graduation rate: 11 percent
Transfer-out rate: 18 percent

Western Nevada

Retention rate: Unknown
Graduation rate: 20 percent
Transfer-out rate: 25 percent

A monetary history of Nevada public education

According to Emily Richmond of the Las Vegas Sun, "History suggests that Nevada’s public schools may never recover from the budget cuts being required of them by legislators after this weekend."

This is certainly the opinion of the school superintendents, some legislators and some special-interest groups. But it isn't true at all.

Not only has public education recovered financially from budget cuts, its revenues and spending have outpaced population growth and inflation combined! Take a look for yourself:

*Per-pupil spending, adjusted for inflation. 1959-2007

*Per-pupil spending, adjusted for inflation. 1997-2007

*Total K-12 education operating budget from all districts, in millions of dollars. Adjusted for inflation. 2001-2011. Note: the FY 10 and FY 11 budgets will be reduced by 6.9 percent, potentially leaving K-12 education with more money than in the last biennium.

*General Fund appropriations in millions of dollars. Adjusted for inflation. 2001-2011. Does not include the 6.9 percent reduction for the 2009-11 biennium.

*Basic support per pupil. Adjusted for inflation. 2001-2011. Does not include the 6.9 percent reduction for the 2009-11 biennium.

Don't take our word for it. Go directly to the source.

*Legislative Counsel Bureau

*National Center for Education Statistics at the U.S. Department of Education