EDITORIAL: Education bill is more of the same

The opening credits for “Groundhog Day” are on the screen in Carson City as legislative Democrats seek to pour more money into public schools while disguising themselves as advocates of educational accountability. If they have their way, expect more of the same dismal academic results that have scarred the Nevada landscape for decades.

Last week, state Senate Majority Leader Nicole Cannizzaro, a Las Vegas Democrat, introduced Senate Bill 460, a 104-page education proposal that covers a sweeping range of school-related topics. It’s inappropriately named the Education through Accountability, Transparency and Efficiency Act. A news release from Ms. Cannizzaro insisted the bill “can improve outcomes for students, help us hire and retain great teachers and staff and give parents more confidence in our educational system.”

If only that were true. In fact, Ms. Cannizzaro and her fellow Democrats have for many years locked arms with the teachers unions and other members of the moribund education establishment to block virtually every attempt at overhauling a system that is failing thousands of Nevada families and their children. Over the years, they have fought against: Read by 3, the breakup of the Clark County School District, teacher evaluation reform, school choice, the expansion of charter schools and more rigorous graduation requirements. The results speak for themselves.

Their default setting instead is that only bottomless taxpayer contributions can improve academic achievement. Yet the Legislature over the past 10 years has twice — in 2015 and 2023 — passed massive tax hikes to raise money for the state’s public schools. Results have been illusory. Democrats and unions see this as evidence that the state needs to spend even more. But it’s never enough — and never will be. And the cycle continues.

Ms. Cannizzaro’s bill reflects this philosophy. The fiscal note on the measure — it “may have fiscal impact” on local government and “contains appropriation not included in executive budget” — is vague, but the cost would probably be hundreds of millions of dollars. Ms. Cannizzaro seeks to expand pre-K programs, though studies show that they don’t always deliver results (see: Head Start). She wants more money for teachers and smaller classes, the latter of which, while popular with parents, have done little to improve performance since Nevada implemented class-size reduction in the lower grades three decades ago.

Ms. Cannizzaro also wants a “qualified” teacher in every classroom, and who could disagree? Yet “qualified” too often has nothing to do with mastery of the subject matter and everything to do with a background in pedagogical training. To the teacher unions, Albert Einstein would have been wholly unqualified to teach high school physics in the Clark County School District because he lacked an education degree.

But the search for “qualified” teachers must include rigorous performance evaluations to identify those who are foundering. Ms. Cannizzaro’s proposal includes provisions regarding teacher assessments but limits student “growth” to just 15 percent of the equation and includes an escape hatch for educators with larger classes. This is weak, particularly when the current teacher evaluation process is a sham of a farce. In Clark County virtually every teacher is graded as “effective” or “highly effective” despite recent test results that reveal just 25 percent of middle-school students are considered proficient in math and only 38 percent make the grade in language arts.

SB460 does pay lip service to accountability by demanding that elementary schools prepare “a 3-year strategic plan to advance academic achievement of pupils” along with a blueprint “to provide remedial study” for struggling students. It even lays out a process for removing principals from elementary schools that aren’t meeting academic goals. This is reasonable but raises the question: Why isn’t this happening now?

But the larger problem with the proposal is its hostility to alternative forms of schooling that are actually producing results. SB460 does little to advance charter schools or school choice, both of which have had success improving outcomes while putting pressure on public schools to improve or lose students. Instead, Ms. Cannizzaro would burden charters with the types of hidebound regulations that they were created to avoid. She should keep in mind that, unlike their traditional counterparts, charters can and do close due to poor performance. That’s real accountability.

SB460 has support from the usual suspects, including teacher unions and Educate Nevada Now, which advocates for spending billions more on the public schools. But Nevada taxpayers should be skeptical. They’ve seen this movie over and over again while enduring the same depressing results.