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EDITORIAL: School district breakup long overdue

Finally, the arguments for preserving the Nevada education system’s dismal status quo have been quieted. Lawmakers have reached a consensus that, in addition to targeted increases in funding, public schools must undergo a radical makeover to improve student performance.

The Legislature’s collective willingness to rethink education and reject the approaches of the past are most obvious in Assembly Bill 394, an old idea that long ago couldn’t get so much as a hearing but already has unanimously passed the lower chamber’s Education Committee.

AB394 will break up the Clark County School District.

There were calls to deconsolidate the nation’s fifth-largest school system long before it was the nation’s fifth-largest school system. In 2000, tens of thousands of Nevadans signed petitions to ask voters whether the school district should be broken up. But the petition fell 18 signatures short in tiny Mineral County under qualification standards that subsequently were ruled unconstitutional. And no plan to turn the behemoth education monopoly into smaller, more manageable, more locally controlled districts has gained traction since.

Until now. AB394 originally was written to give cities the option of forming precincts within county school districts, but was amended to provide much stronger orders. The rewritten version of the bill creates the process by which the Clark County School District will be split into at least five local precincts for the 2017-18 school year.

The bill establishes a nine-member advisory committee with four legislative Democrats, four legislative Republicans and one member of the general public, to be advised by education officials and a consultant charged with producing a deconsolidation report. Once the committee comes up with a plan, the Clark County Commission must hold public hearings. The plan could be revised after those hearings.

AB394 doesn’t authorize a study that leaves deconsolidation in doubt. It is not a typical Carson City punt. It specifies that the Clark County School District must be broken up by summer 2017, and it gives the committee the option of completing the job by summer 2016, if possible.

The task won’t be easy or without controversy. The committee must deal with matters of race and wealth, in addition to academic performance and splitting existing construction debt. Critics of deconsolidation argue that such issues cannot be resolved equitably, and that precincts would create higher costs through redundant operations and administrative functions, that any breakup will result in haves and have-nots. But Magdalena Martinez, director of education programs at UNLV’s Lincy Institute, testified (and wrote in a Review-Journal op-ed) that research shows large school districts have higher proportional costs and poorer student outcomes.

The most important reasons to break up CCSD are competition and choice. Having multiple systems across the county would create pressure for precincts to perform better and give parents the ability to leave a struggling system for a better one.

AB394 will accomplish something that should have been done decades ago. The Legislature can’t pass it fast enough.

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