Sunday, Jan. 29, 2006 | 9:26 a.m.
Jon Ralston hosts the news discussion program Face to Face with Jon Ralston on Las Vegas ONE and also publishes the daily e-mail newsletter RalstonFlash.com. His column for the Las Vegas Sun appears Sunday, Wednesday and Friday. Ralston can be reached at 870-7997 or through e-mail at [email protected].
The Council for a Better Nevada has accomplished in short order what no one could achieve in decades: Turn the Clark County School Board members into sympathetic figures.
Well, almost.
How two groups composed of mostly well-intentioned folks could combine to produce the embarrassment of the council's white knight falling on his lance last week is an object lesson in politics and human behavior.
Say what you will about the School Board's indecisiveness and dithering. But the real story here is how elected officials, often seen as compliant before moneyed interests, react when they are treated shabbily by a hauteur-afflicted group of business leaders that let thuggish tactics overwhelm noble intentions.
Walt Rulffes, the School District insider patronized and derided by the council folks, is the new superintendent because of the council. And Eric Nadelstern, the council's messiah of reform, is not there because his backers overplayed their hand and forced him to fold last week.
And so the most complex problem this community faces -- improving the stressed and strained and too-often subpar public education system -- was reduced to a simple formula: The status quo (Rulffes) vs. the change agent (Nadelstern).
Even worse is the false expectation created by the School Board and the council -- that getting the right person, if such a person exists, as superintendent will have a transformative impact on public education in the valley.
This is a conundrum not easily solved, but the superintendent search is but synecdoche for the shortsightedness and insular thinking that has characterized the local approach to public education for decades. The laughable per-pupil funding that makes the national average the Holy Grail. Bond issues expiring in a place where schools can't be built fast enough, resulting in the lie known as class-size reduction, which actually is team-teaching to 40 kids. An inflexible teachers union and its Democratic allies who won't even consider merit pay and other accountability measures, thus short-circuiting any chance of getting Republicans to the more-funding table. A melting pot of a student population with challenges facing no other district in America.
And these folks are lamenting the tragic loss of a New York bureaucrat who has some limited success as a reformer?
Spare me.
It's easy to lampoon the School Board -- and I have done it through the years. But what person in his right mind would run for an elected job that pays nothing and asks you to oversee the fastest growing district in the country?
And now add a group of do-gooders who can't be bothered with putting their names on the ballot but are happy to threaten and demean those who do?
An e-mail sent to council members by the group's executive director, Maureen Peckman, shortly after Nadelstern decided to withdraw was an exemplar of arrogance run amok, sneering at the board members as dysfunctional and behaving badly. As opposed to the council, I suppose.
Not to worry, though. Peckman wrote that Nadelstern told her that he might reconsider "should the composition of the School Board change to the degree that they are more willing to embrace the required reforms to make public education effective for all students."
Now that's helpful. Demean the School Board and threaten to oust the members. As someone put it to me last week, we have an adult problem in Clark County, not a child problem.
Frankly, I don't believe Nadelstern ever had a majority of the School Board committed. I think most were leaning toward Rulffes but were swayed by Nadelstern's innovations. But when the council put together a team of stalkers to interfere with the School Board members' fact-finding in New York City, turning it into a circus, that guaranteed Rulffes the job.
To be fair, the Council for a Better Nevada is not some nefarious, star chamberlike cabal of malefactors plotting the overthrow of the government. They already run most of the government.
While the name has to go -- it reeks of the condescending snootiness of those who always know what's better for the rest of us -- these are not simply folks who spout off between Sun Valley ski runs or sips of a 1966 Bordeaux.
Some of these are committed, knowledgeable business executives, although it will be hard to get past the image of white men pontificating in a backroom, albeit a nice backroom, between puffs on their cigars as they show off pictures of their kids in private school uniforms.
But even if they are nobly motivated, this council needs counseling. The road to failed campaigns is paved with good intentions. So when I hear that the council's next grand plan is to take control of the opposition to Sen. Bob Beers' Tax and Spending Control initiative, I think the senator should start looking for a venue to host his victory party.
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