EDITORIAL: Few gold stars in the nation’s report card

Despite a record amount of taxpayer support for public education, students at both the state and national level continue to underwhelm. The latest results from the “nation’s report card,” released last week, reveal that American children have regressed in terms of reading skills and are treading water in math.

In Nevada, the results were mixed. Fourth graders showed slight improvements in math and reading, but eighth graders went in reverse, losing ground in both subjects over the past year. Nevada’s 2024 scores in both grades were well below the national average.

“The news is not good,” Peggy Carr, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, told The New York Times. “We are not seeing the progress we need to regain the ground our students lost during the pandemic.”

It’s worth noting that COVID-era learning loss was, in significant part, a result of the education establishment’s insistence that schools be shuttered during the pandemic though children were at minimal risk from the virus. Teachers unions — intentionally stoking fear with hysteria predicting mass deaths in the event schools were to reopen — then slow-played a return to campus in many jurisdictions, further harming the academic progress of students.

In addition, the federal government sent $190 billion to districts across the nation — $770 million to the Clark County School District — to mitigate the deleterious effects of remote schooling. That seems to have been a colossal waste, courtesy of the American taxpayer.

One notable take from the data was that high performers are still making advances while many of their peers struggle. “We are deeply concerned about our low-performing students” one national education official told the Times. “For a decade, these students have been on the decline.”

It hasn’t helped that, in Clark County, school officials implemented a dumbed-down grading policy that allows numerous test retakes and awards credit to students even when they fail to complete an assignment. Lowering academic expectations sends precisely the wrong message — particularly to kids with average or poor grades.

Nevada lawmakers in 2023 approved $2 billion in new funding for the state’s public schools. That came just eight years after the folks in Carson City passed $1.5 billion in tax hikes to boost education spending. Yet the elusive payoff is always years down the road and dependent on evermore spending.

Two years ago, Gov. Joe Lombardo demanded academic progress in return for the generous increase in school funding that he signed. “If we don’t begin seeing results,” he said. “I’ll be standing here in two years calling for systematic changes to the governance and leadership in K-12 education.”

We’re waiting.