Nevada needs more education competition

Gov. Brian Sandoval on Sunday joined more than 20 other governors in signing a proclamation recognizing School Choice Week. Twenty-nine events are scheduled around the state this week to celebrate educational choice. That's great. What would be even better? If Nevada already had more school choice.

Gov. Sandoval has repeatedly called for some form of school voucher or tax credit, which would allow poor and middle-class families the same option to escape poorly functioning public schools as is enjoyed by wealthier neighbors, who are able to "double pay" private-school tuitions as well as the taxes that fund the government-run schools they don't use.

Most voucher programs shift only a portion of a child's per-student funding from a school district to a family's chosen private school. Thus, vouchers have the effect of leaving tax money behind, increasing per-student funding at public schools. Such voucher programs, when not shut down by union pressure, have proved enormously popular - and vastly oversubscribed - among poor families in the Midwest and even in Washington, D.C.

The time has come for the Nevada Legislature to act in the best interests of its constituent families and employers - rather than an entrenched educational bureaucracy - and draft an expansive school voucher plan.

Private schools remain few and far between in Southern Nevada. Instead, lawmakers and public school administrators, fearful of losing control over their effective schooling monopoly, push such compromises as magnet schools and charter schools. Many of them have been successful here, as well, showing the efficacy of even incremental independence and innovation.

Although charter schools are intended to create alternatives to traditional public schools, with independent managing boards and a looser bureaucratic straitjacket, it's still an open question whether the model will keep growing.

Many parents appear pleased with the results achieved by principal Connie Jordan with her 600 K-8 students at the Quest Academy charter school in Las Vegas, for instance. If the school were funded by private tuition alone, the decision of that school's board to reward Ms. Jordan for her accomplishments with a $15,000 bonus last year would be unexceptional. But because the school receives $5,249 in tax money per student, the Nevada State Public Charter School Authority is now threatening to revoke the school's charter over what it considers $15,000 in "unearned bonuses."

Ms. Jordan and the majority of the board that has been defending her are racial minorities, whereas her critics are not. There may be financial reasons for some to oppose her moving the campus. Yet "to restore parents' and the authority's confidence in Quest," state authority Director Steve Canavero wrote in an eight-page letter to the school's governing board last month, the school "may" need to replace Ms. Jordan and even many of their own board in a "radical reconstruction."

If the state were threatening closure over academic failure at the school, that would be one thing. Instead, threats to remove Quest Academy's board of directors and founding principal go directly to the question of just how independent Nevada charter schools really are.

Nevada needs school vouchers. Soon.