EDITORIAL: To bolster high-tech education, reform schools

The urgent need for education reform in Nevada was underscored this week when a new report laid bare the inability of Nevada’s K-12 system to provide a sufficient number of students with high-tech skills.

The Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program and UNLV-based Brookings Mountain West released “Cracking the Code on STEM: A People Strategy for Nevada’s Economy.” STEM is an acronym for science, technology, engineering and math. You might not have heard of it because, for all practical purposes, STEM training doesn’t exist in Nevada, and as a result, a workforce with STEM skills doesn’t exist, either.

The report warns of a shortage of workers with high-tech skills, which is greatly limiting Nevada’s ability to attract high-tech companies — and the high-paying jobs they create.

“Our high-value companies are telling us loud and clear that the single most important factor in their next location decision is the workforce,” Jonas Peterson, chief operating officer of the Las Vegas Global Economic Alliance, the region’s economic development agency, told the Review-Journal’s Jennifer Robison. “If we’re successful in creating that labor pool, we’ll be successful in attracting those companies.”

But relying solely on Nevada’s school districts to develop and implement that strategy would be a mistake because, to date, they have failed to graduate an acceptable number of students who have even basic academic proficiencies, let alone advanced math and science skills.

“Brookings highlights very clearly that our school districts underperform in the area of STEM education. ... So this is an absolute message to the school districts that they need to improve instruction in math and science,” Dale Erquiaga, Nevada’s superintendent of public instruction, told Ms. Robison.

Unfortunately, school districts are held hostage to collective bargaining rules, monolithic salary scales and protectionist licensing standards championed by teachers unions. School districts should be able to search the state and the country for highly trained professionals and educators, and offer them competitive salaries to take over Nevada classrooms. But under those restrictions, the Clark County School District can’t even hire professors currently teaching information technology, engineering or advanced math at the College of Southern Nevada — unless they’ve completed the certification coursework existing teachers were forced to endure. And even if schools could offer jobs to those already up to speed on technical education and skills employers value, those candidates would be locked into a low salary because of their lack of previous K-12 teaching experience. The education bureaucracy’s unfailing loyalty to credentialism defies common sense.

Nevada’s public schools must jettison the practices that already limit basic math and science education. School districts must embrace the idea that some teachers are better than others, some skills are more valuable than others and, sometimes, classroom experience and levels of education have no correlation to teacher performance.

To churn out the country’s best and brightest graduates, Nevada will need some of the best, most highly skilled teachers. And to do that, Nevada’s school districts need faster alternative certification programs, more hiring flexibility and a merit pay system that not only rewards high performers, but provides significantly higher base salaries to positions that are critical to workforce training.

But most of all, Nevada schools need competition. Charter and private schools have far more freedom to pivot, innovate and hire than do traditional public schools. And every family could afford private school tuition if the state offered vouchers, education savings accounts and tax-credit scholarships.

STEM training, economic diversification and education reform go hand in hand.