Wednesday, Nov. 7, 2007 | 7 a.m.
The morning talk show debate on school funding seemed filled with good intentions, with state Sen. Bob Beers pleading for intellectual honesty.
Nevada ranks 37th in the nation in school funding, he proclaimed, not 49th as some would suggest to gain sympathy for schools.
Beers, a CPA and uber -budget hawk, was the only one who could cite a source among the top-flight panel of guests on KNPR's "State of Nevada."
And his source sounded unimpeachable - the National Center for Education Statistics, a division of the U.S. Education Department.
So we called the fine statisticians there. And here's what they said.
Nevada ranked 46th in per-pupil expenditures in 2005 (the most recent year available for comparison), according to analyst Frank Johnson.
Does this suggest Beers is wrong and everyone else is right?
No. It says Beers crunched his numbers differently from everyone else.
Johnson said he was able to duplicate Beers' findings by adding other costs, including school construction, adult education and special services.
And that's the rub. The feds calculate per pupil spending a different way.
They base their formula on daily operating expenditures, such as teacher salaries and benefits, administrative overhead, cafeteria food, gas and electricity. School construction, for instance, is not counted.
But Beers included the other costs, including construction. And with that formula, Nevada advanced over 11 other states.
Using the fed s' standard formula, Johnson said , he does not believe Nevada has substantially improved its rank in the past two years. While Nevada's per pupil expenditures might have increased , spending by other states is also on the rise.
The notion of including construction costs in per pupil spending - as Beers advocates - is generally rejected by analysts who study education funding.
"People in my business consider those different animals and don't like to mix them up," said John Augenblick, a consultant who conducted the Nevada Legislature's school funding adequacy study in 2006. A fast-growing district might spend millions of dollars in a single year on new construction, while a neighboring community has no need to build. That's why per pupil expenditures are supposed to reflect what happens inside the classroom, and not what it cost to build the classroom, Augenblick said.
Beers maintains that Nevada is spending more money per student than is being reported by the school bureaucrats.
For example - and you have to really enjoy working with numbers to follow along - Beers points out that some campus maintenance costs are paid for with school construction bond money that isn't reported as school operating expenditures. If it were reported, Nevada would look better in the overall scheme of things, he notes.
But the Clark County School District says that would hardly make a difference, adding only about $34 per student. In 2005, Nevada's average per pupil expenditure was $6,804, compared with the national average of $8,701.
Beers is not the only one to pick and choose statistics that best support a position.
Lynn Warne, president of the state teachers union, has been saying that Nevada ranks 49th in per pupil funding as she tries to sell a proposed initiative that would increase education funding. She uses a national ranking done by the National Education Association. She doesn't point out another part of that survey: The average Nevada teacher's salary ranks 26th nationally.
If she wants an alternative set of figures that appears to support her case, Warne doesn't have to look far.
Beers, who determined we're 37th in per pupil spending, also pulled out how our teacher s' salaries compared with other states'. By his calculation, our teachers' pay ranks 48th.
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