By DR. LARRY MOSES
No one asked me but… I warned you at the first of the year that education would often be a topic in this column. I grew up professionally in the Clark County School District. I have a fond affection for the district. I watched it grow from a rather small well-run district to the massive bureaucratic morass that it is today.
When I joined the district in 1967, it was a close-knit group of educators who were part of one of the top districts in the United States. People came from far distances to observe the educational innovations and successes of the district. As the city of Las Vegas grew, the district ballooned and picked up the problems of the huge districts characterized by places like New York City and Los Angeles.
The district lost sight of the most important feature of education; the fact that education is not a group activity; it is a personal one on one relationship between the teacher and the student.
There is no such thing as group learning. Learning takes place within the individual not within the group.
In this sense, the process of teaching and learning is similar to baseball. It is an individual effort within a team setting. Each time the batter steps to the plate, the pitcher throws the ball, the fielder plays the ball he will succeed as an individual or fail as an individual. The individual success or failures will be translated in the success or failure of the team. The same is true of the student sitting in the classroom with thirty other students. Each student’s success or failure will be an individual success or failure. That will then translate into the success or failure of the educational institution as a whole.
This brings me to the weakness of the federal “No Child Left Behind” (NCLB) program. NCLB sets the same goal for all children no matter their abilities.
One must understand that to set an arbitrary standard that is below the ability of some and above the ability of others is not a sound policy. Even worse, though, is evaluating those who are educating the individual child by this arbitrary standard. We have seen this happen recently in Clark County with the removal of principals and teachers without consideration of the students with which they are working.
To compare students with anyone other than themselves is of no value in education. It matters little what the children in Iowa achieve compared to those in Nevada. The only valid test of teacher success is a pretest given at the time the teacher receives the student and a post-test at the time the student finishes the course.
Under NCLB a teacher who receives a sixth grade student reading at the first grade level and moves that student to the fourth grade level in a year is still deemed inadequate when they should be congratulated. No matter where the student starts, if it takes more than three years to get the student to grade level, teachers are deemed so bad that they must be removed along with the principal.
I call this the Rumplestiltskin Principal. If you don’t spin straw to gold in three years, you lose the baby.
No one asked me but… The school board has decided how to solve the $400 million shortfall for the next two school years. There will be nearly 2,500 school employees looking for work. When we talk of dollars in a business that is labor intensive, those dollars translate to people losing their jobs.
It is a lot easier to talk dollars than jobs, because the jobs lost are those of your friends and neighbors. Even if you minimize the jobs lost to teachers, those who are support staff and administrators are friends, neighbors, and family. When you see a department is losing twenty percent of its budget, that is not just dollars, that is jobs.
Here is an interesting fact. According to Applied Analysis, a Nevada based business advisory firm, the nearly 2500 layoffs would result in another 5,593 lost jobs in southern Nevada. They indicated that for every job lost, no matter what the occupation, another 2.25 people would lose jobs in unrelated fields costing the state $889 million in economic output.
If this translates into a conservative 10 percent in state taxes, the state will lose another $89 million in tax revenue.
In addition to cutting jobs, the new Superintendant Dwight Jones is asking those who are not losing their jobs to take a reduction in salary of 7.8 percent. The average teacher salary in Clark County is $44,426. This would mean the average teacher would be paying the district $3,465 to maintain his/her job. This would be a direct tax on the teachers to support the education of the children of the Clark County. So much for your no new taxes governor!
If teacher salaries are to be cut by 7.8 percent, why should the workload not be lowered by the same percent? Teachers are paid only for the days they work. They are presently contracted for 184 days. There are not paid holidays and not paid vacation days.
The fact that teachers receive a paycheck over the summers leads some to believe they are paid for days they are not working. The fact is their pay is pro-rated and paid year round. This is convenient for the teachers and is to the economic benefit of the Clark County School District who holds that money in an interest bearing account. The interest earned is not returned to the teacher but is used in the general fund.
If teacher pay is to be reduced 7.8 percent, it would only seem logical that their workdays should be decreased by 14 days.
Thought of the week… “Education is not received. It is achieved.”
– Unknown
