LETTER: You can really see Nevada’s education failures
We have had one of the lowest-ranked school systems in the country for a number of years. Those unprepared children pass up from grade to grade and eventually matriculate into general society. That’s when the real impact of failed teaching begins to show.
That impact ranges from clerks who can’t make change to government workers managing systems that are targeted by hackers. Nevada was targeted because it is vulnerable. Nevada workers fail at many other jobs between those two extremes as today’s world demands great communication skills (reading and writing), the ability to manage finances (math) and the ability to understand the difference between a scam and an opportunity (common sense). While many other states — including Mississippi, once the bottom-dweller — thrive, Nevada operates at an eighth-grade level.
For at least the past eight years, every new idea and reform to the educational system has come with a big price tag and increased wages for everyone in that closed system. A favorable view of the results would be no change, while the reality is we are paying much more for worse performance. We now celebrate the lack of turnover and retention among those educators who are at the heart of our bottom-five ranking.
The challenges citizens have to overcome due to the inability of our schools to prepare kids to enter society are sometimes small and sometimes they cause a state agency to shut down. Either way, failures in the classroom trickle-up to inability in the grocery store, casino and statehouse.
