10 Comments
Facebook
Fark
Digg
Reddit
Stumble
Published Thursday, Jan. 7, 2010 | 1:01 p.m.
Updated Thursday, Jan. 7, 2010 | 1:01 p.m.
Why can't Nevadans be more like Utahns and less like the people in D.C.?
That's what Governor Gibbons wants to know and why he's decided it's time to blow up Nevada's public school system.
The governor wants to know why student achievement in the Silver State is not golden.
A potential answer: Nevada's one-note economy and lack of social services force its residents to struggle to make ends meet by taking on multiple minimum wage-paying jobs that eliminate the opportunities for parental involvement in things like school, homework, family dinners and church... all very big in Utah.
On today's Face to Face with Jon Ralston... which now airs LIVE at 4 p.m. and STATEWIDE on your local NBC affiliate...
Jon and our guests will touch on some of the governor's proposals, such as laying off teachers and eliminating union representation of public employees.... who, by the way, are among the highest paid in the nation.
Statewide and in Utah, where you air on KVBC's St. George translator, so all those stay-at-home moms of successful children can watch.
Another potential answer is that an unresponsive and inefficient bureacracy more interested in protecting jobs & turf than educating children has stifled reform & innovation to the detriment of all. The sooner our tax dollars go towards educating children and not building up the eductional bureacracy, through true competition & accountability, the sooner we'll see genuine improvements in performance.
Bad parents is a lame and tired excuse. Good teachers and good schools figure out away to reach low-income children. http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/201001/go...
Teacher pay in Nevada ranks 22nd according to the NEA, 19th according to the AFT and 17th according to the John Locke Foundation.
Nevada has a below average poverty rate - pretty good "despite" our low per pupil spending.
Utah's public education is good, but they are also mostly white. We should be more like Florida... http://npri.org/publications/failure-is-...
PS, as I stated before only about 1 out of every 3 staff at CCSD is a classroom teacher ... http://npri.org/publications/financing-e...
and that our system is designed to waste money on programs and jobs for adults not ideas that improve student achievement http://npri.org/publications/financing-e...
Patrick - How much of the CCSD budget goes toward unfunded special ed mandates? I've always been curious what percentage of the CCSD's budget goes to special ed, and what percentage of students are special ed.
Bring,
Special ed actually gets millions of dollars. So much money, in fact, research by Dr. Jay P. Greene at the University of Arkansas shows that it might be triggering an increase in students labeled with learning disabilities - (the school lables the kids with a learning disability to trigger the additional money).
PS, private schools tend to educate special needs children for far less than the public schools.
I've actually seen this in action Patrick. In High School, my daughter attempted to take a certain class that she wanted, but was denied. Investigation revealed that in the 6th grade, my daughter was given some kind of test and it was determined that she had a learning disability. No one ever bothered to tell my wife or I about this, and my daughter received absolutely no kind of special attention for this learning disability. The only thing she got was denied this class because she was "Special Ed." Supposedly the school system is supposed to have meetings with the parents and retesting periodically, but for the 5 years my daughter was in this program, I nor my wife never heard a thing. My daughter remembers talking to a counselor when she first started High School, but that was it. Not to mention how do you justify keeping an A/B student on "Special Ed?"
The core problem our schools currently face and will continue to face is a complete lack of accountability for student performance. Our teachers' union has an airtight contract that makes it impossible to reward good teachers or dismiss bad ones. Add to that a lack of comprehensive programs for individualized teacher improvement training and you get to enjoy 49th place in the nation.
sorry PATRICK good education starts at home. good parenting is the key. teacher can't replace there parents. parents need to sit down with there kids at night and talk about there work. don't transfer the parental duty to the teacher. because teacher have same problems at home.
Bad parents are the problem' It's not the job of the schools to raise your kids you had them you do it.