School choice
Nevada behind the curve on charter schools
Silver State continues to miss real educational opportunities
Charter schools are more likely to actually educate low-income and minority students.
Money down the drain
It’s time we got results for our public-education spending
The Clark County School District has over a half dozen funding sources. Including all sources, how much does Clark County really spend per pupil?
School fights
Parents will ultimately win the right of school choice
Examining how parents' desire for school choice divides the Democratic party.
Meeting the challenges in special education
Parental choice would be a wise and affordable first step
Special education vouchers improve the quality of education for special needs children and keep others from being misidentified as disabled.
Same old story in Nevada education
Silver State still in need of genuine reform
Cornelius Vanderbilt sold passages across the Atlantic on steamers for as little as $30 a ticket. Andrew Carnegie's steel company became so efficient it forced the world price for steel down from $56 per ton to just $11.50 in less than 30 years. John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil, by 1890, was selling oil for just eight cents a gallon. These entrepreneurs ran their businesses efficiently and made their profits massive by simply giving customers what customers wanted — at better rates than did the competition. Today they are vilified as robber barons, as many people focus on tales of good or bad intentions, rather than actual good results.
Invested in mediocrity
Washoe County School District ignores law on education reform
Unfortunately, Nevada's public education runs largely on the same principles as the Soviet Union economy. Central-office bureaucrats ration teachers, books, maps, computers, administrators, janitors, basketballs, light bulbs, etc. — despite inferior knowledge of what resources are needed where and who needs them most. This ineffective use of scarce resources means shortages, waste and large bureaucracies that, predictably, become ends in themselves. Jobs for adults, rather than education for the children, become the priority. The Washoe County School District is no exception.
When government ignores its own laws
A dubious way around genuine education reform
Imagine if a Nevada business decided not to pay taxes. Supporters of big government would cry that it was "not paying its fair share," and state officials would swoop down upon on the firm like vultures to a carcass. The state would devour all it could and imprison the company's management for violating the law. But what happens when government ignores laws it creates?
Grading empowerment schools
So far, so good
Government-run public education in America has long imposed on schools central bureaucracies that ration key resources, including teachers, textbooks and many more school supplies. Currently, Nevada is attempting to break away from this unworkable system, the primary source of the state's well-known K-12 problems. The new approach — most advanced in the Clark County School District — uses the "empowerment school" model, which creatively exploits the intelligence naturally operating within market processes.
Opportunity missed
Steven Horsford cannot stand up to the NSEA alone
Three months ago, the new majority leader of the Nevada Senate, Steven Horsford, seriously displeased the president of the Nevada State Education Association teacher union. Horsford did so by admitting, indirectly, the long and lethal hostility of that union to virtually each and every effort to reform Nevada public education. "It is about the future and the children who depend upon us in the classroom," said the young majority leader in a debate over the hotel-room-tax increase. "The children are more important to me than any teachers group, than any company who thinks they can decide tax policy."
Power for Nevada education
Empowerment schools offer beacon of hope for serious education reform
By 1989 the Soviet Union's iron curtain had all but collapsed. Though the transition from communism to capitalism was tough, the people were reclaiming freedom in politics and in their private lives. Gone were the days of central planning, where soviet commissars sat on high, issuing production quotas for factories and determining how goods would be rationed among the people. Unfortunately, American public education today is largely run in much the same way that the Soviet Union ran its economy.
