Las Vegas Sun

March 29, 2024

SUN EDITORIAL:

Can’t cut to greatness

Governor’s budget offers severe reductions that would hamper education

Lawmakers started reviewing Gov. Brian Sandoval’s $5.8 billion two-year budget proposal this week in a series of hearings. The governor outlined his plan in his State of the State address Monday night, and his plans for education — which consumes a bulk of the state budget — immediately came under scrutiny.

Sandoval called for a series of changes in the way the state’s education system is both funded and operated. Under Sandoval’s plan, funding for school districts would be cut by 9 percent and higher education would see a decrease of nearly 18 percent.

The governor’s education proposal would compound a serious funding problem in the schools, which have gone through several rounds of cuts and years of being poorly funded. Democratic Senate Majority Leader Steven Horsford declared that the budget proposal “dismantles public education in Nevada.”

The governor has taken the position that the state needs to spend money more efficiently, not spend more money. “Education reform is the linchpin to a solid return on our investment,” Sandoval said.

But as we have noted before, this isn’t an either/or debate. The schools should be spending their money as efficiently as possible, but classroom funding in Nevada on a per-pupil basis is among the worst in the nation. And Sandoval’s plan would further drop the per-pupil funding.

In his speech Monday, Sandoval said his proposal would make “public money work harder,” but that’s simplistic. The schools haven’t achieved with the tight funding they’ve had, so how spending less would make them achieve more goes beyond logic.

As it is, funding is so bad that parents of children in the K-12 system in Nevada are often asked to donate supplies — from hand sanitizer to copy paper — to help the schools.

Regarding higher education, the proposed cuts would hammer a system that has suffered a series of major cuts over the past few years. Sandoval’s response is to give the university system’s Board of Regents the power to raise tuition — pushing off the problem to the regents. That’s one of several budgetary sleights of hand the governor used to balance the budget and shift the cost of government to other sources.

Sandoval is also asking lawmakers to eliminate several mandates, including all-day kindergarten programs for at-risk schools, early childhood education, class-size reduction efforts and gifted and talented education. Sandoval would replace those, at less expense, with block grants that would let school districts spend the money on programs as they wish. His plan would likely lead to an increase in class sizes and lessen individual attention for students, and those can’t be good for student achievement.

The governor proposed several other changes to education, including eliminating teacher tenure in the public schools and tying teacher pay to performance, using achievement scores as a major indicator. Tenure should be revamped so it’s harder to obtain, schools should have more discretion so they can fire bad teachers, and merit pay is a good idea but it shouldn’t be solely tied to achievement scores.

Sandoval also called for an end to social promotion, improved charter schools and increased accountability, giving parents more information about how schools perform. The Legislature should take up those ideas, but they can’t be seen as the panacea for an educational system that has been struggling to perform.

The state does have to make changes to the system to improve the quality of education and leaders will have to make hard choices about spending. But it’s foolish to think that implementing policy changes while cutting the budgets of the already underfunded schools will somehow lead to better days. Lawmakers need to address the whole picture to give students a brighter future.

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