Columnist Hal Rothman: Why splitting up the school district is a bad idea, and why Sen. Tiffany keeps trying to do it

Hal Rothman

Sunday, Nov. 27, 2005 | 8:18 a.m.

Hal Rothman is a professor of History at UNLV. His column appears Sunday.

Once again, the prospect of dividing the Clark County School District into a series of Balkanized provinces has reared its ugly head.

This maneuver would not only resegregate the Clark County School District, it would also create a real division between haves and have-nots at precisely a moment when other economic conditions, such as the price of housing, are pushing the community apart.

I cannot imagine why anyone would think this is a good idea.

Not surprisingly, the source of this is state Sen. Sandra Tiffany, who for more than a decade has brought this topic up time and again.

Tiffany's motivations are obvious: She represents a part of the Las Vegas Valley with comparatively high household income, that could be the basis of a well-funded suburban school district that would gain at the expense of the rest of the valley in any division of the district.

Her Henderson-based district would have all kinds of advantages. If Tiffany could tie districts to their tax base, hers and other suburban districts would be able to fund students at a much higher level than the state currently provides.

With a more affluent base from which to draw, they would also be able to benefit from the generosity of parents and nearby businesses, creating the kind of powerful suburban school districts that exist around most major American cities.

I live in Tiffany's district, but I couldn't be more opposed to the division of the school district. Despite its obvious flaws, the school district does a remarkable job of projecting and then managing the phenomenal growth that we see every day. In each of the past 15 years, we have added enough students to equal roughly the average American school district.

While our overall test scores are not impressive, what we've been able to do is. We have built more schools than we can count and assimilated thousands of new students, many of whom bring real academic and social problems with them. We've been able to create the beginning of the system that provides educational opportunity widely across the community.

Students who bring pathologies from other places do not necessarily succeed here, and this should not surprise anyone. What is important is that the context in which they can succeed exists. Only a large, well-funded school district can provide that.

Breaking up the school district would become an administrative nightmare.

A series of smaller districts would be forced to compete with one another for resources. Each would have a separate administration, a remarkable drain of resources in a state where education is perennially underfunded.

Waves of administrators would replace teachers as each district tried to meet the tsunami of misguided federal legislation like No Child Left Untested -- oops, I mean No Child Left Behind. Each district's educational opportunities would suffer.

In a world where teachers are scarce in the valley and we must recruit as many as 2,000 each year from outside our borders, competition among the districts for teachers would be fierce.

Given the funding formula, ultimately the competition would extend to students as well. Districts would offer incentives to students to jump boundaries, always with an eye on the state funding formula.

Smaller districts would not be able to offer the wide variety of opportunities currently available in public schools. They would be more like private schools, trumpeting their successes while only being able to provide them within narrow realms. The bleating would be constant; the attempts to maximize each district's position against the others ongoing.

Magnet schools and projects like the Las Vegas Academy would be hard to sustain. The arts and sports would suffer, for smaller districts are notorious for their inability to sustain athletic programs. The great tradition of Las Vegas high school sports would surely diminish.

The trend in the valley is toward the dissolution of community-wide institutions and their reinvention as neighborhood-based entities. For truly local entities, churches, sports leagues and the like, this makes sense.

Tearing apart the school district is a craven effort to extend privilege to the privileged. Our problem is not the size of the school district. It's the amount of funding the schools receive and the unfunded mandates that are yokes around our collective neck. We remain fifth lowest in the nation in per-pupil school funding. Let's start by fixing that problem.