Education
Battling for control of the state education system
Will the interests of the many finally trump those of the few?
Nevada currently finds itself in a bizarre situation in which both everyone and no one are simultaneously in charge of the state’s public K-12 education system.
Shades of Julius Caesar in empowerment plan
The LEAPS plan is designed to destroy Gov. Gibbons' empowerment proposal.
It was the same date, centuries ago, when a man popular to the people and dangerous to the elites walked through the Roman forum to the Senate. He would not be returning. It was the Ides of March and conspirators lay in wait.
On the Ides of March this year in Carson City, State Sens. Steven Horsford and Dina Titus unveiled their LEAPS, or Local Empowerment and Accountability for Public Schools, plan.
Thoroughly Inadequate:
The 'School Funding Adequacy' Evasion
A new study that recommends doubling public expenditure on Nevada's public schools is deeply flawed.
Nevada’s hidden accountability wars
Disdain for parents’ goals for their kids is built into the public education establishment. But most politicians never get it.
Senator Bill Raggio had his doubts. Minutes of the 2005 Legislature’s hearings make that clear.
But Gov. Kenny Guinn was eager to try something “new” with Nevada’s huge number of at-risk public schools, and he’d announced the idea in his State of the State message.
Is Nevada public education 'adequate'?
Funding adequacy study ignores the most important issue
Has the Silver State’s public education system become an underperforming, expensive, and obsolete security blanket?
Is it really age-appropriate for a society facing global competition and technology advances in the 21st century?
Nevada's 'Reading Disabled'
Susie's mother called at the end of January two years ago. Her daughter -- in special ed -- was not learning anything.
Susie, a 12-year-old 6th grader, had been in special education since kindergarten -- which she had repeated twice. She had been labeled "learning disabled" by the public school system, but her mother was sure something was wrong. She wanted to know: Could our private school perhaps help her daughter?
The Private Sector Would Do Better
Nevada’s big school districts don't make the grade in business terms, either
Evidence just keeps stacking up: Nevada’s two metropolitan school districts are too large and bureaucratically ingrown to do their jobs.
Does School District Size Matter?
Recent studies suggest that students, teachers, parents and taxpayers are all better off where school districts are smaller in size.
Dead and Not Knowing It, Part 2
Nevada’s tax-financed universities, it was pointed out here last week, are still trying to make a paradigm work that no longer corresponds to reality.
Dead and Not Knowing It, Part 1
Nevada's tax-financed universities are based on a paradigm that no longer represents reality.
Nevada’s higher ed system is already dead. True, it still moves, makes noises and feeds industriously on taxpayers, but the fact is, its core paradigm—as understood since the system’s 19th Century founding—is as defunct as Monty Python’s parrot.
