Staying in school

It's the talking point the tax-consuming class never tires of telling us: Nevada ranks at the bottom of the states in every important social index.

Now that the Legislature has raised taxes by $1 billion, politicians and bureaucrats are counting on more dismal rankings to prop up their campaign for bigger tax hikes in 2011 -- even if the numbers behind the rankings are totally bogus.

Enter Education Week magazine's annual Diplomas Count study, which for the second consecutive year declared Nevada the nation's dropout champ. Nevada's high school graduation rate was 47.3 percent, 50th among the 50 states, the magazine said.

The Clark County School District's graduation rate was worse at 46.8 percent, ranking it 43rd among the country's biggest 50 school districts.

Clark County Superintendent Walt Rulffes could barely catch his breath: "The citizens in Nevada should be up in arms about being at the bottom of the list for education, health care and other social services for their children."

Health care and social services? And here we thought Education Week's research just focused on graduation rates.

But as it turns out, calling this report "research" is a stretch. Its flawed methodology makes it less useful to Nevada policymakers than a paperweight.

The Diplomas Count report isn't based on actual numbers of students who've graduated. Rather, it estimates the likelihood of a student graduating from high school by multiplying the percentages of students who advance year to year to come up with ... a glorified guess that controls for nothing.

Additionally, the study is based on U.S. Department of Education census figures from three years ago. Nevada's own data from 2005-06 show the state had a graduation rate of 67 percent, while Clark County's was 63.5 percent. That's because the state's school districts try to check out high school students who disappear from enrollment and determine whether they ended up enrolling somewhere else. They can make the numbers look as good or as bad as they want them to.

Neither set of figures can fully account for Southern Nevada's highly transient population. Neither can account for the number of illegal immigrants and anchor babies who come and go from Clark County School District classrooms and shouldn't be here in the first place.

Most importantly, no compilation of graduation data can measure whether parents take an active role in their child's life, whether they've ever bothered to read a single book or review a single math assignment, or whether they even care to notice that their teenager has stopped going to class.

Certainly, Nevada's public schools can do a better job of educating the state's future workers, and the Education Week report at least highlights that most states graduate more of their students than we do. But is anyone foolish enough to believe that if taxpayers and businesses would only hand over another couple of billion dollars per year to Nevada's education establishment -- the same people who turned out remedial college students when revenue was pouring in hand over fist -- that our schools would deliver a commensurate level of improvement?

As Mr. Rulffes said, the citizens of Nevada should be up in arms. They should be shouting down the calls for higher taxes and demanding education reforms, instead. They should cry for the deconsolidation of the country's fifth-largest school district so competitive pressure can be applied to the valley's public schools. They should demand that lawmakers make it easier for entrepreneurs to open and run charter and voucher schools. They should tell their school boards that bad teachers should be fired, not moved from campus to campus.

And they must insist that the state's most disruptive, disrespectful and uninterested students be denied the opportunity to ruin the education of students who care -- even if it means reducing the state's graduation rate.