EDITORIAL: Students again take a back seat in the school district

The Clark County School District embarked upon a new academic year this week. But the kids are playing second fiddle to an acrimonious pay dispute between district officials and the local teachers union.

The distraction is unfortunate in a school system that has struggled for decades to improve its dismal academic standing despite repeated infusions of taxpayer support. But it becomes even more regrettable given the learning loss that many students experienced during the pandemic.

Las Vegas isn’t alone in this regard, of course. A recent Wall Street Journal report outlined how employers are finding that many recent high school graduates are wholly unprepared for the workforce.

“It’s one reason professional service jobs are going unfilled and goods aren’t making it to market,” the paper wrote. “It also helps explain why national productivity has fallen for the past five quarters, the highest contraction since at least 1948.”

One professor told the Journal that “reading, writing and critical-thinking skills are not the same as they were in the past.” Test scores on exams for future engineers and nurses have fallen sharply, exacerbating shortages in those professions. “These are areas that are very much involved in public safety,” one observer noted.

Some critics point the finger at a public school system that seems more interested in passing students on than ensuring they have demonstrated mastery of basic skills.

The owner of an employment agency in Illinois told the Journal that “she has seen sharp declines in the behavior of job applicants as well as their performance on employment exams.” She said math and spelling skills are as bad as she has seen. “I’m really concerned by the product that’s coming out of the school system currently,” she said.

The owner of a Michigan business said she has noticed a decline in motivation among new hires. She attributes this to the fact that “her young employees haven’t been held accountable for things like finishing homework assignments.”

That will sound familiar to those who follow the Clark County School District, given that Superintendent Jesus Jara implemented a new grading policy two years ago that minimized penalties for students who ignored their homework.

The Journal report should be a wake-up call for taxpayers across the country, but especially for foundering systems like the one in Clark County.

While the administration and the union bicker over how to split the largest ”investment” ever made in the state’s public schools, there seems to be precious little concern about the academic standing of the district’s 295,000 students.