Las Vegas Sun

March 29, 2024

jon ralston:

Rory’s noble yet impractical plan to rescue education

Education in Nevada can be fixed by empowering principals, allowing parents the freedom to send their kids anywhere and giving the pupils neato computer programs.

And it’s free!

Rory has a plan!

Hallelujah!

When Clark County Commission Chairman Rory R--d unveiled his “plan of action to strengthen schools and reform education in Nevada” this week, it encapsulated everything that is right and everything that is wrong with the Democrat’s campaign for governor.

Here’s what’s clear about R--d’s campaign: He is seriously trying to find answers to complex issues, and he just as seriously wants to dodge any questions about how to pay for his programs. He is running away from any fiscal questions about the state’s future as fast as he is fleeing from his family name. (Check out his Web site — “Rory 2010 Nevada First.” And, apparently, in Nevada, he hopes first names are all that matter.)

R--d’s declaration that his new education plan is “revenue-neutral” is unsupportable. He simply claims: “They’ve done it elsewhere.”

If you read through the EDGE (Economic Development Through Great Education) plan — it’s clear the commissioner (or his staff) has talked to a lot of people here and elsewhere, collecting quality information and many statistics to meld existing ideas: Empowerment schools, improved technology, teacher-student accountability.

Giving him the best of it, R--d earnestly believes in what he is selling, even though some parts of the package seem costly (retaining and attracting great teachers) and unworkable (simply telling parents they can send their kids anywhere). But his sales job is replete with clichés and gimmicks, including at a town hall Monday evening at Walter Bracken Elementary School, where you once again had to admire and gag at the choreography.

I felt real sympathy pains for Guy Hobbs, the numbers maven called onstage by R--d to explain how his plan penciled out. Hobbs went to the, ahem, edge of what I call his obfuscatory fiscalspeak to dance around the question before the candidate forced him to simply say it works. And I felt a wave of nausea as invited guests acted as if the education messiah had arrived, with Maureen Peckman of the Council for a Better Nevada (aka Those Who Know Better Than All of Us About Everything) said she is behind Rory “150 percent” and “Rory gets it.” She, like most people, he hopes, apparently only knows him by his first name.

R--d, unlike Madonna or Prince or any other one-namers, is no rock star. And he knows it. Like his father (shhhhh), his dry wit is often obscured by his pallid complexion and demeanor. So he has opted to try to sway voters by being the gravitas candidate, the one unlike the desperate governor or mute ex-judge or long-shot former mayor with real ideas, encased in slick booklets with colorful pictures and bold fonts. Rory has a plan!

The politics of this are easy to understand. He has no primary — where have you gone, Barbara Buckley, a liberal Nevada turns its lonely eyes to you — so he can propose something that gets a gushing response from the conservative Nevada Policy Research Institute. And R--d disparaged his GOP opponents Monday during his media tour, saying they only want to cut education, an overstatement to say the least. “That’s not leadership,” he solemnly intoned on “Face to Face” and elsewhere.

But nor is it leadership to bamboozle a public desperate for an improved K-12 system with a different kind of EDGE plan — Education Doesn’t Get Expensive. Maybe R--d is angling for an NPRI fellowship if this whole governor thing doesn’t work out, but it’s just not credible after hundreds of millions have been chopped out of the education budget in this state.

To be fair, in comparison to his foes, R--d is the candidate of substance. But is something always better than nothing? By avoiding all talk of financial issues — it’s paid for, really, because I say so! — in advance of the fiscal apocalypse, aka Session ’11, R--d, should he become governor, will have to administer a rude awakening to a public that believed his revenue-neutral nonsense.

I have previously lamented that in the early going the debate over Nevada’s future has been disappointing and even vapid — and it’s not so early anymore. The issues are complex and nettlesome. And, yet, on the question of how to fund the state going forward, all of the gubernatorial candidates say something too offensive and too insipid to spell out:

R--d my lips.

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