EDITORIAL: Rankings show CCSD deserves zero stars

Yet more evidence has come out showing how poorly things are going in the Clark County School District.

Last week, the Board of Trustees received a presentation on the academic performance of the district’s more than 340 schools. The results were abysmal. Start with the star rankings, which come from the state. They’re supposed to be a quick way for parents, staff and policymakers to identify how a school is performing.

A five-star school has “superior academic performance,” according to the Nevada Department of Education. A one-star school “has not met the state’s standard for performance.” A three-star school is in the middle, defined as a school with “adequate” performance.

Last year, 39 percent of district schools were rated three stars or better. That’s a substantial decrease from the 2018-19 school year when 55 percent of district schools received three stars or more. Thanks to the pandemic, that’s the last time Nevada put out star rankings.

That’s a stunning amount of failure, but it gets worse. Last year, more than twice as many schools received one star as received four or five stars. And those numbers exclude alternative and special education schools.

When Superintendent Jesus Jara started his job in 2018, he laid out ambitious targets for academic growth in a plan called Focus 2024. His goal for the last school year was for all schools to be three stars or better. Not only did that not happen, but things have gotten substantially worse.

A host of other academic measures show substantial declines. Third-grade reading proficiency dropped from 46.7 percent in the 2018-19 school year to 39.3 percent last year. Eleventh-grade math proficiency dropped from 24.5 percent in 2018-19 to a tiny 19.2 percent. Proficiency rates in science are so low, you wonder if the district even bothers teaching it.

Mr. Jara and the education establishment have a ready-made explanation — the coronavirus. It’s true that COVID and prolonged school shutdowns put a damper on student achievement. Achievement remains low across the country. On the Nation’s Report Card, reading scores were similar to 1992 levels.

But that’s an excuse, not a solution. Mr. Jara’s policies — such as gutting school discipline and lowering grading standards — exacerbated learning loss caused by virus closures. Student absenteeism has soared. The money that lawmakers dumped on the district has fueled labor unrest, not increases in student achievement.

By his own standards, Mr. Jara and the district have performed miserably. All the more reason to provide local students and families with increased schooling options.