EDITORIAL:
Real Reform Is Never Easy, Nor Painless
Last week the national education trade journal, Education Week, published its 12th annual edition of “Quality Counts”, a yearly report on state-level efforts to improve public education. “Quality Counts” grades each of the 50 states and the District of Columbia across six areas of education performance and policy.
Nevada’s scores, across the board, were abysmal. “Quality Counts” gave the Silver State an overall grade of D+. In the category of ‘Providing Opportunities for Success,’ which combines 13 educational opportunity indicators that span an individual’s life from cradle to career, Nevada was ranked 48; just ahead of New Mexico, Louisiana, and Mississippi. In the category of ‘K-12 Achievement;’ index which examines 18 distinct achievement measures relating to reading and math performance, graduation rates and Advanced Placement exams; Nevada graded a D-minus and was ranked 45 in the nation.
Interestingly, the one area where Nevada beat the national average was in incentives and special allocations paid to its teachers. This is not too surprising given the recent difficulties in keeping the state’s schools staffed with teachers.
What is disturbing, however, is that, despite these higher teacher incentives, there has been little success in increasing quality and accountability in Nevada’s educational system. The report showed that the state was significantly below the national average on educational standards, assessments, school accountability, and teacher accountability for quality. Evidently the fact that we have outspent the national average in teacher incentives has not brought us anywhere near the national average in K-12 achievement.
In the face of all of this, Nevada Governor Jim Gibbons announced plans last month to cut nearly $97 million from statewide K-12 education. Admittedly, there is no reason that the state’s K-12 funding should be held particularly sacrosanct. There is tremendous waste in Nevada education. It is evident that vast sums of public funds have been spent on countless programs and administrative positions, which have not yet, and probably never will, improve the quality of education in the classroom.
On the other hand, there are many education reforms that could be made to the Nevada system, which would cost little or nothing to the taxpayers. The State Superintendent of Education over the last 5-years has received numerous communications from the U.S. Department of Education informing the State that the Nevada High School Proficiency Examination is not in alignment with Nevada Alternate Scales of Academic Achievement test. This means that Nevada students are not being taught in the classroom what they are required to know on their tests to graduate from high school. It seems a no brainer that curriculum should match a graduation exam. And it really shouldn’t cost anything extra to align curriculum with those exams. With the roughly $1 billion Nevada spends in education each year one would think it would take less than five years to fix this problem. But, according to the State Superintendent, there are currently no plans to do anything about it.
When push comes to shove, though, Nevada’s K-12 system will have to take its share of the “necessary” funding cuts. Early targets for these cuts seem to be the newly conceived school empowerment and all-day kindergarten programs. Education administrators find these areas the easiest to cut because, being brand new programs, the money for them has not yet been spent. Thus, we are told, eliminating these programs would be the least painful way to start making the necessary cuts. But the school empowerment and all-day kindergarten programs are the first glimmers of real reform that the state has considered in a generation. Given the obvious need for education reform, why should administrators be so quick to apply the axe to the first programs down the pike that hold out a hope for reform? It makes no sense for the state to hunker down, at the first sign of difficulty, and call an immediate halt to plans for education reform before the campaign has even begun.
Real reform is never easy, especially when it takes place simultaneously with a state budget crunch. Nevada cannot afford to wait out its budget crisis before starting down the path of education reform. We are already decades behind the rest of the country. Reform is needed now. If it is truly committed to reforming education, the state must move full steam ahead despite the financial bumps in the road that will always be there.
Given the dismal state of Nevada’s education system, there is simply no easy or painless fix. There is already plenty of waste existing in the system that ought to be cut. This should be done no matter how painful or uncomfortable it may be for administrators to do. Rather than simply taking the quick and easy path, state and local administrators should take a closer look and think outside the box. They should make the more painful cuts to the barren long-standing programs and wasteful administrative positions that have not gotten any measurable positive results in the past. Then they should stay the course in nurturing innovative new ideas and programs that yet hold out hope for real education reform and a better future for the children of this state.
