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Wednesday, June 8, 2011 | 1:55 a.m.
Dwight Jones
Sun coverage
Beyond the Sun
Sun archives
- Superintendent announces plan to boost student achievement (5-26-2011)
- Graduation rate in state bad, but is it this bad? (6-17-2010)
- Ad points to accomplishments of high school seniors (6-16-2010)
- Long road to graduation: Faces of adult education (6-14-2010)
- Road to graduation runs through science test for Class of 2010 (5-27-2010)
- Superintendent suggests ways to increase graduation rates (2-11-2009)
- Graduate rates too low, dropout rates too high (1-2-2009)
A detailed analysis in a story in Education Week, raises further questions about the accuracy of previously reported high school graduation rates for the Clark County and Washoe County school districts, which are responsible for educating 85 percent of the state's public school students.
The Education Week numbers produced with the Editorial Projects in Education Research Center show that Nevada’s high school graduation rate was 44.3 percent for the academic year ending in 2008. That placed it 50th in the country, just behind of the District of Columbia, which recorded a 43 percent graduation rate.
New Jersey led the nation with an 86.9 percent graduation rate, followed by Vermont at 82.7 percent and Wisconsin with a rate of 81.3. The national average was 71.7 percent.
The Clark County School District lists its 2008 high school graduation rate at 65 percent, according to data found on its website. The Washoe County School District places its 2008 high school graduation rate at 56 percent, according to a report on its website.
The Education Week article notes that the 71.7 percent national average in 2008 was the highest figure since the mid-1980s and followed two consecutive years of decline and stagnation, and it offered a troublesome note for Nevadans.
“The 44-percentage-point chasm separating the highest- and lowest-performing states remains alarming,” the story says. “The national leaders — New Jersey, North Dakota, Vermont, and Wisconsin — each graduate more than 80 percent of their high school students. At the other extreme of the rankings, fewer than six in 10 students finish high school in the District of Columbia, Georgia, Louisiana, Nevada, New Mexico, and South Carolina. Overall, graduation rates in about half the states fall within 5 points of the national average of 72 percent.”
Long-stated doubts about the accuracy of the Clark County figures have been a point of public frustration for the district’s new superintendent, Dwight Jones, who assumed the job in November and is in the process of adopting a revised methodology that would have placed the school district’s previously reported June 2009 high school graduation rate at 51 percent rather than the previously reported 68 percent.
Jones has publicly expressed his frustrations with the reported numbers, saying that district officials must be open and transparent about the numbers before taxpayers, business and political leaders will support the district’s needs.
Clark County public school administrators have previously discounted from the graduation figures tens of thousands of students who disappeared from the region’s high schools between the 9th and 12th grades. Top officials routinely argued that an unknown, untraceable number of students were lost to transient families that moved in and out of the region and argued that the district had no way of determining what percentage of those students dropped out of school rather than transferring to schools elsewhere in the country.
The new graduation rate is designed to account for the number of students who start the 9th grade with the Clark County School District and finish within four years with a high school diploma rather than a less stringent certificate of attendance. The formula is intended to accurately account for students who transfer in and out of the school system during that period. The Education Week analysis employs a similar formula.
Pedro Martinez, the Clark County School District’s newly hired deputy superintendent of instruction, says just 10 of every 100 students who start the 9th grade within the school district will receive a college bachelor’s degree. That is about half of the national average, and the Southern Nevada figure is lower for ethnic minority students.
Hey everybody,
Let's all keep putting our 6-week old babies into daycare centers. That $9 /hr. burnout will do a fine job of raising your child. No worries. Why wouldn't those employees give your child the love and individual attention they need? That's what they're getting paid for, right?
And, definitely, when our kids are at home, let's put them in front of tv / video games for hours at a time. Put a tv in their room so they will just disappear for whole chunks of the day.
This will work out great. Chickens won't come home to roost. This drop-out problem must be due to lack of funding. Or bad teachers. Or both. It is the mining industry's fault. Or the school board. Or the teachers' union. Or Sandoval.
Whatever you do, don't try to wake up from a t.v. induced coma to see reality for what it is. That's not what we do in America and especially not in Las Vegas.
@"An estimated 16,114 Clark County School District high school seniors will fail to graduate a year from now" And yet that won't eliminate a single one of them from getting a job with Metro.
The system is obviously broken and needs to be fixed. Parents are to blame for the most part but the school system has plenty of issues that need more than money to solve.
All the dropouts can go to work at Harrahs for 8.45hr. GOD HELP US
@bghs1986
Metro requires a high school diploma or GED.
Since all of the fuss about losing teachers has been settled and the verdict is that there will be no loss of classroom teachers and the class size will REMAIN THE SAME we should see a HUGE jump in graduation rate... right?
After all we heard since Sandoval proposed his budget was less money means a disastrous result to graduation rates!
Once again I will ask the question that no one will answer....
How much more will it cost to elevate Nevadas graduation rate to that national average?
No Elko that isn't another Morman cricket infestation enroute that is causing the chirping you are hearing!
@Robert2..."Metro requires a high school diploma or GED."
Yes, so as I said, not a single one of the 16k students who will fail to graduate need worry that this minor setback will prohibit them from getting a job with Metro.
I feel safer already.
This is why businesses are hesitant to relocate here. It has nothing to do with taxes or politics just the applicant pool.
@pnmmart. The fuss about losing teachers is NOT settled. The district is getting an extra 250 MILLION from the state. The district still wants concessions from the unions, which include paycuts, etc. which will have to negotiated.
Graduation rates do not change overnight. Teachers see a student for 50 minutes per day, for 184 days a year. Nothing has been said about the parent's responsibility in education. Do you know who your student's teachers are? When was the last time you checked Parent Link? Do you know how many absences your student has? Do you know the school office phone number? Have told your student that getting a diploma is important?
Anyone really surprised? The public school system is broken beyond repair and should be dismantled. A private school school system should replace it with vouchers given to parents so they can make the choice of which school will better educate their childer instead of nameless, faceless, unelected, unaccountable bureaucratic drones!
@lvfacts101. Nevada has less than a hundred charter schools, with less than 50 in Clark County. Tuition for most of those schools is well above what a voucher would be for. Charter schools can be selective in who they chose to admit. How does that solve the problem?
@Pnmmart, your post it totally correct.
Tanker1975,
You gave me the same response that you gave to PNMMart a month or too ago on this subject. How many times have you used that line to make other people feel like they are the problem? You do not need to have a child in the school district here, to know it's messed up.
You can't give a number or an intelligent answer to the problem! Were in last place. I say get rid of the whole program. Obviously it's not working, is it?
When you transfer all students over to private schools, the problems go with them. You've just made the private schools into public schools. And it's considerably more expensive for a private school education - it will cost parents several thousand dollars to make up the difference between what the state spends per student and private school tuition.
The state must provide an education so the most likely solution would be for the state to spend several thousand dollars more per student on vouchers. If we're going to spend millions more on vouchers for private school, why not invest it in the public schools instead?
The state is not going to do anything - plain and simple. It will keep underfunding education and we will keep plodding along with our inadequate system, dumb students, and low graduation rate. Nobody cares.
The pathetic graduation rates have nothing to do with the quality of the education system in NV. It has everything to do with the quality of parenting and the households where these kids are raised.
For the last 30 years we supplied our state with industries that require mediocre levels of education. The demand for retarded labor was met by thousands of new households, not to mention the other thousands drawn by the false notion that casinos offer the chance to get rich with one pull and the 24-hour nightlife.
The result is obvious if one steps near the urban centers. Strung-out substance abusers with tattoos on necks and enough metal stuck in them to open a pick & pull. A new, worthless generation that breeds seemingly at a higher rate than the taxpayer, in part because each offspring brings income from the state.
This new, worthless generation was produced on the backs of profit that was never invested back into NV's future. And ironically, the solutions offered by the worshipers of more profit and less taxes are in the form of privatization and vouchers. I am sure that I am not alone wondering how the vouchers will magically improve impoverished households and pull the unsupervised kids off the street. Maybe NPRI can enlighten me as to the social-engineering aspect of their plan.
Let's see. No real vocational education and a repressive exit exam. Where is the incentive to stay in school if you don't offer the classes students want and then tell them if they can't pass a test that's comparable to a college entrance exam they won't get a diploma? Fixing this is a no brainer, but it takes money and the courage to admit every student isn't going to want to go to college. If we were to offer some basic math classes with algebra being the top required course for graduation along with some basic English classes, then the college prep track could become more intensive and really prepare students for college.
OpenRange: "The pathetic graduation rates have nothing to do with the quality of the education system in NV. It has everything to do with the quality of parenting and the households where these kids are raised."
Are you serious? I mean, I think everyone should acknowledge that parents and families play a vital role in the process, but to ignore the epic failure that is the CCSD (I assume other NV school districts are similar) is silly. Have you ever had to deal with the district on a project? Let me tell you, it's literally the most inefficient, ineffective group I've ever worked with. Not a slam on the teachers, but the administrative bureaucracy. The hoops you have to jump through to get anything done is dizzying, and nobody could give me a reasonable justification for those hoops. I think we've all had or seen some teachers that are simply bad at their job, lazy, or that have just given up hope. I know that we've all seen parents that should never have been allowed to procreate, let alone be responsible for raising a productive member of society.
We need to acknowledge that we ALL have to take some responsibility for the community's failures, then come up with a plan to improve. We can't just point fingers at teachers, or parents, or administrators, or politicians. We all need to accept some level of responsibility and volunteer to do whatever we can to improve this horribly embarrassing statistic.
Hey, FINK...
Get a clue!!!
Certainly no one with an ounce of sense can deny the blatently obvious...
Our Hispanic population drags down test scores and ravages the graduation rate numbers. Just the facts.
"Teachers see a student for 50 minutes per day, for 184 days a year"
Tank
I bet that your above figures could be used in the other parts of America where the student graduation rate is in the 80% range so you aren't helping your cause there.
As to dumping on the parents it ain't gonna fly ...unless you can start charging them for their kids sins.
The real problem of graduation in Nevada is both complex and simple.
No. one is demograpics .. we have five issues black ,brown, olive [yellow is an insult], white and illegal and by not acknowledging the fact that each division requires meeting different peer preasures and social problems is ducking the issue and a failure to communiate is a failure to produce graduates.
No. two is the very make up of the two population centers in Nevada and that issue is that the labor force doesn't require an educated populace.
Instead of blaming the parents for the drop out rate I believe that we need to do 'exit' interviews to determine if there is a correctabe trend with the dropouts as soon as they can be located instead of the 'grownups' sitting around and guessing about the issue.
Don't mean to sound smirkey but I only have one child [43 yrs young] and she graduated from HS and JC and her daughter also graduated from HS and is attending nursing school. All this in high graduation rate Iowa where the new teachers just received a new contract with a starting pay of 21,500 dollars per school year[I don't know why they even start there]
I hate repeating myself,but if you want to see nevadas future,drive by any school at 2 pm
peace out
Yo Gmag39"I just went to my kids award ceremony and saw plenty of Hispanic kids getting A and A/B honor roll and perfect attendance awards, so maybe it's the Blacks, Jews, or Catholics dragging down our numbers 'eh?
Also, in future instances of ethnic bashing, do try to spell the words correctly mkay, thanks.
you know after further thought,maybe this is really simple to understand
in fact it is very simple
the natives leave this state with their families early to avoid the crap educational system
the transplants(loosely)move in with their 143 kids,no id,s,no documents,no incomes,welfare recipients,and saturate the educational statistics daily
Folks,remember these kids are a product of their environment,so do all of the politically correct studies pertaining to educational stats all you want.the fact is it wont change the lazy,materialistic,entitlements that most of these kids feel is theirs
a hummer with 22,s on all four sides,rolling with the 6 kids,and shopping at walmart obviously isnt educational(sarcasm)
75% of the residents in this town live for the day,definately not for the week,if you get what im saying.25% of you will,,rofl
peace out
Ok, well we still have overpaid trigger happy cops and outrageously overpaid fire frauders, right?
Way to go, Las Vegas. And from the results of the elections, and the people running, we can expect more of the same lunacy.
The precipitous drop in graduation rates and test scores is a direct result of Clark County's exploding Hispanic population.
In 20 years the percentage of hispanic students has skyrocketed above 50% as a result of massive illegal immigration and supercharged birth rates.
Our civic duty to educate Latin America's children has come at a frightening cost indeed.
CCSD has failed, and like a Yugo, you can only afford to repair it so many times. Time to start looking for a new car, not just a new driver.
re: lvmachead
I agree that our schools are lacking vocational classes/training for those who know a traditional college is not for them. However, to compare the high school exit exam to a college entrance exam is like comparing apples and oranges. Four of my five children all passed the exit exam as freshmen. It really isn't that difficult for the students who paid attention and got average grades (B-C average) through middle school and their freshmen year. Even the students who don't generally "test well" can pass it by their second try. Granted, my kids all knew that education was their primary responsibility and they were expected to graduate.
K12 people, look into it. It's FREE...
http://www.k12.com/nvva
This is why a bill made it to the gov's desk that would allow students that failed a subject to still graduate. Luckily he had the common sense to veto the thing.
I guess they figure if they can't teach them...just pass them anyways.
So everyone knows it was suported and lobbied by the teachers union. You would never find that story in this paper luckily there are other sources.
Instead of placing blame, I want you people to be rational and think a little bit deeper than you normally do (if at all possible): Here we go:
There are many states whose graduation rates are better than CCSD. Is it the CCSD teachers? Think about it. There are only a handful of local teachers. Most of them were recruited from all over the US and some from abroad. What is it? Did they lose their "teacher ability" when they came here?
Let us think about the community from those states who have higher graduation rates. Compare them to Las Vegas. Got any clues there?
Think about the parents and families of those states with higher graduation rates. Are you getting any hints?
Think about the school systems in those states with higher graduation rates and the people who run those systems. You see any similarities?
If you can think as I ask, research if you need to, post here what you find and blame whomever you want, but please give Ceasar what is Ceasar's.
But then again, thinking would probably be too much to ask.
And for last place we pay top dollar. We're paying more than twice what Europe pays for K-12 but they get GRADUATES WHO CAN READ AND WRITE. They don't pay teachers to network and step up to higher pay. They PAY FOR PERFORMANCE and DO NOT HAVE a teacher for every 17 ILLEGAL STUDENTS--of the 100,000 illegal students in Nevada.
Tanker: you say teachers have limited if any influence on student education, performance, graduation.... So why do we pay them? We don't need them 'cause they don't educate our children.
@roseanrose. I would also point out that the school year in Europe is between 200-220 days with the longest break being one month. The school day is also longer. So you are not exactly comparing the same thing when you look at the US school year of 180 days with a three month break in the summer so the kids can work the fields. Yes, our school calendar dates back to the 1850's when kids were part of the farm labor force. You also forgot to mention when you compared to Europe that the teachers are respected members of the community, and that most European countries recruit their best and brightest to be teachers.
I would suggest that you read some of the posts above. The first time a kindergarten teacher sees a child is when they are 5. Has the parent taught them their colors, the alphabet, how to recognize shapes, how to count to 10, their address? My 3 year old grandson knows all of those. That is a child who is ready to go to school. How is a teacher supposed to make sure that a child gets homework done after they walk out of the classroom, especially if they don't see the child again until the next day? Who is responsible for that?
We pay teachers so that we have the engineers to build roads, doctors to cure cancer, scientists to develop new technology, or would you prefer to live with no cell phone, no HD TV and no internet, and die of an infection because we don't have any antibiotics?
A general question for all who care to answer it. If you think that teacher pay is so good and that we only work "part time" why aren't you trying to become a teacher so you can share with the good deals?