CCSD admits governor's proposed spending increase will just enshrine the status quo
One of the big themes of Gov. Brian Sandoval's state of the state speech was that he wanted Nevada to spend more on education. In his budget, Sandoval proposes spending $135 million more on education in the next biennium.
One of the big themes of NPRI's work has been to demonstrate, again and again, that Nevada has tried to increase educational results by spending more but that pouring money into a broken system has failed miserably. Also, there is little to no correlation between spending and student achievement.
An article in today's Review-Journal shows exactly why blindly spending more only entrenches the status quo.
Even if the state approves a $135.8 million increase to education funding sought by Gov. Brian Sandoval, Clark County schools might remain just as crowded, with an average of 35 students per classroom in grades four to 12.
Under Sandoval's two-part plan, the majority of the money, $88.8 million, would be used to increase the state's basic funding to districts, which stands at $5,374 per student. That would be bumped to $5,697 by 2015, a 5.9 percent increase.
That probably would equate to $60 million more for the Clark County School District. ...
The district, in contract talks with its four employee groups, isn't the only party with a say in how additional funds might be spent. Although some district unions in the past have agreed to pay freezes to keep costs down for the cash-strapped school system, there is no guarantee that will continue.
"With the wave of an arbitrator's pen, that money could go elsewhere," said Fulkerson, referring to possible pay raises for 17,000 teachers, the district's largest employee group, a matter that is in arbitration.
If the arbitrator, an objective third party, upholds teacher salary increases, it would cost an extra $50 million, Fulkerson estimated.
CCSD officials need to aggressively point out how broken Nevada's binding arbitration system is in order to push change at the legislature. Let's hope Fulkerson's pointing this out is the first step of many the district takes to highlight that salary decisions shouldn't be made by an unelected, unaccountable lawyer from California.
Otherwise, Nevada will end up with yet another example of how spending more only enshrines the broken status quo, and our students will continue to suffer in failing schools — their opportunity for a quality education slipping away as Nevada's politicians try something we already know will only continue the status quo.
***Two additional notes on this topic.
First, CCSD's class size number is garbage. There are around 311,000 students in CCSD and 17,000 teachers. That's 18.3 students per teacher. If average class sizes are really that large — and I'm not convinced they are — then CCSD is choosing to taking thousands and thousands of teachers out of the classroom. That's a management issue that money won't fix.
Second, it'll be interesting to see Superintendent James Guthrie's comments during the next few months. For now, he's praising Sandoval for spending more.
Success won't be apparent for four or five years should gains in student achievement be realized, said Guthrie, praising Sandoval for the 5.8 percent increase to education funding, which critics say is not enough.
"I believe our posture should be thank you," said Guthrie, noting that education is up for more of a funding increase than any other activity in the state.
As a scholar, Guthrie noted that education funding is a "phony crisis" and "[s]chools have been riding a century-long wave of rising revenues." I know when you work for a governor, you have to support him, but I hope Guthrie is able to use his bully pulpit to explode the myth that pouring money into a broken system is going to produce results.
Otherwise, Nevada will keep pouring money into a broken system and every two years our politicians will announce they have a plan to solve our education problems ... by pouring more money into a broken system. After all, that's what they've been doing for 50 years.
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You know the excitement you feel when you buy something new? A new suit, new shoes, new sporting equipment? That’s the feeling I’ve had this week when I visit NPRI’s homepage, http://npri.org.
That’s because on Monday, we unveiled a completely redesigned site that is much sharper and easier to navigate while offering a host of new features we’ve wanted over the past few years.
Want to share NPRI’s research and analysis on Twitter, Facebook or Pinterest? Now it’s as easy as clicking a button.
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Want to see all of our research on education or public debt? Now our research is grouped by categories like taxes and transparency. This makes it much easier to find everything we’ve written on the subject you care about.
The ability to search the site is also much, much improved. I know our staff is thrilled about that in particular.
One of my favorite features is right under the main section. It features quotes from individuals like former president George W. Bush, former U.S. attorney general Ed Meese and Congressman Joe Heck praising the work of NPRI. That section changes every time the page loads, so refresh the page if you want to see all the quotes.
Those quotes speak highly of NPRI, but I hope you take pride in them as well, because every success we have is a result of your generous support and your willingness to share our research with friends, colleagues and lawmakers.
Head over to http://npri.org and click around. Please let me know what you think about the site and if there are any changes you’d like to see.
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NPRI President
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Remembering Rose Moore
Over the weekend the valley lost a staunch advocate for children — to many a good friend. Rose Moore was well known in the CCSD education arena for her determination and fight. She believed wholeheartedly in helping students and holding the school district accountable. So, that’s what she did…and did it well. While her methods and perseverance may have caused a few administrators to yank out a lock or two of their own hair, every CCSD person I’ve spoken with in the last few days had the same, kind remembrances — “Rose was committed to her causes and she will be missed.” Knowing Rose, there could be no better eulogy.
From Rose’s early days as a special education advocate to her recent bid for school board — and all the miles in-between — I have had the pleasure, support, fun and adventure of calling Rose a friend. I will sorely miss her.
Funeral services
Monday, January 21, 2013
Open casket viewing from 9:00 am to 11:00 am
Closed casket Mass beginning at 11:00 am followed by a buffet gathering
St. John Newman Catholic Church
2575 West El Campo Grande Ave, North Las Vegas
The family request donations in lieu of flowers which will be used for the funeral expenses.
Remember......whatever we do, we do it for the kids.
--Rose Moore
Coming soon
Every week, NPRI President Andy Matthews writes a column for NPRI's week-in-review email. If you are not getting our emails, which contain our latest commentaries and news stories, you can sign up here to receive them. Just enter your email in the box next to the testimonial.
Coming soon
Is Nevada one of the most business-friendly states in the country?
Is Nevada a low-tax state?
Does Nevada exemplify what a free market looks like?
Many people think the answer to each of those questions is yes, but they're wrong.
Governments in Nevada put numerous barriers in front of aspiring entrepreneurs. Nevada's level of tax collections per capita is near the national median. Excessive taxation, regulation and licensing requirements are just some of the means by which government, at the state and local levels, prevents us from benefiting from a truly free economy.
Those are just some of the findings of an economic development study that NPRI will release next Tuesday. This study is so timely, given Nevada's economic challenges, that we decided to have some fun and do a teaser trailer for it. I wanted to share it with you.
That video features several business owners who have been kind enough to share their stories with NPRI, and you'll be learning more about the barriers they face in the upcoming weeks.
If you are a business owner or employee who has first-hand experience with how government prevents you from serving your customers, and if you're willing to share your story, would you please email me?
Providing facts and figures is valuable, but we also want to be able to personalize our research by sharing stories of how government overreach harms individuals. If you're willing to share your story, please email me, and we'll be in touch.
Be sure to check out npri.org on Tuesday to read the full study, and let me know what you think.
Until next time,
Andy Matthews
NPRI President
Remember, if you'd like to receive the latest from NPRI, sign-up for our emails here. Just enter your email in the box next to the testimonial.
Coming Tuesday: The Pathway to Sustainable Prosperity
Next Tuesday, NPRI is releasing a study on economic development. The study is so good we decided to have some fun and make a trailer for it. Enjoy.
Be sure to visit npri.org next Tuesday to read the full study.
Remember when Obamacare was going to reduce health care costs?
At the time Obamacare passed, most of you probably understood that (another) massive government intervention into health care wasn't going to reduce costs, but those folks who rely on the New York Times for news sure were in for a surprise this week.
Health insurance companies across the country are seeking and winning double-digit increases in premiums for some customers, even though one of the biggest objectives of the Obama administration’s health care law was to stem the rapid rise in insurance costs for consumers.
Particularly vulnerable to the high rates are small businesses and people who do not have employer-provided insurance and must buy it on their own.
In California, Aetna is proposing rate increases of as much as 22 percent, Anthem Blue Cross 26 percent and Blue Shield of California 20 percent for some of those policy holders, according to the insurers’ filings with the state for 2013. These rate requests are all the more striking after a 39 percent rise sought by Anthem Blue Cross in 2010 helped give impetus to the law, known as the Affordable Care Act, which was passed the same year and will not be fully in effect until 2014.
And, via the Review-Journal, the news isn't any better for Las Vegas' University Medical Center.
The Affordable Care Act will cost University Medical Center tens of millions over the next six years, hospital officials warned on Monday.
While the law, known as Obamacare, is designed to expand health insurance to everyone, it comes with a few catches for urban public hospitals such as UMC; it drastically reduces other forms of federal funding and doesn't expand insurance coverage to illegal immigrants, hospital CEO Brian Brannman told Clark County commissioners.
The result will be an estimated net loss of more than $52 million through 2019, he said.
Depressed yet? Here's more good news. President Obama doesn't think the country has a spending problem. He thinks we have a health care problem that the country just "solved" with Obamacare. Good grief.
What stunned House Speaker John Boehner more than anything else during his prolonged closed-door budget negotiations with Barack Obama was this revelation: "At one point several weeks ago," Mr. Boehner says, "the president said to me, 'We don't have a spending problem.' " ...
Mr. Boehner looks battle weary from five weeks of grappling with the White House. He's frustrated that the final deal failed to make progress toward his primary goal of "making a down payment on solving the debt crisis and setting a path to get real entitlement reform." At one point he grimly says: "I need this job like I need a hole in the head."
The president's insistence that Washington doesn't have a spending problem, Mr. Boehner says, is predicated on the belief that massive federal deficits stem from what Mr. Obama called "a health-care problem." Mr. Boehner says that after he recovered from his astonishment—"They blame all of the fiscal woes on our health-care system"—he replied: "Clearly we have a health-care problem, which is about to get worse with ObamaCare. But, Mr. President, we have a very serious spending problem." He repeated this message so often, he says, that toward the end of the negotiations, the president became irritated and said: "I'm getting tired of hearing you say that."
More: Here's Thomas Mitchell's take on this mess.
(h/t Hot Air)
"What about the lunatics that spend $16.4 trillion and want another check?"
Here's a Friday feel good from CNBC host Rick Santelli. I'm all about calm and detailed presentations showing how the federal government's spending is unsustainable, like this one from NRO's Yuval Levin, but after a week where so many of the"smart" people pretended a $62 billion tax hike was something significant, it's time for some righteous indignation.
Enjoy.
Here are the charts from Levin's blog post. If I was Rick Santelli, I'd be yelling this next sentence, "It's a spending problem, stupid!"
"Why would we want to help somebody?"
If you were a fan of the hit TV show Seinfeld, you likely recall the series finale. The storyline of that episode finds Jerry, George, Elaine and Kramer stranded in a rural Massachusetts town after their Paris-bound plane is forced to make an emergency landing.
While killing time waiting for new transportation, the four friends witness an unfortunate man being robbed and carjacked in broad daylight. They respond characteristically — not by helping him but by savagely mocking him.
The joke, however, is on them. They are immediately arrested by a nearby police officer, who informs them that they've just violated a local "Good Samaritan Law" requiring individuals to assist those in danger. A baffled George speaks for the group: "Why would we want to help somebody?"
I don't know whether Steve Schafer ever watched Seinfeld, but I'm having a fun time imagining his facial expressions were he ever to see that particular episode.
Schafer is the main character in a story from Wednesday's Las Vegas Review-Journal, which chronicles his frustrated attempts to play the part of the Good Samaritan at Lake Mead. In a perverse inversion of the Seinfeld plot, National Park Service officers have repeatedly spurned Schafer's offers to help recover the bodies of drowning victims — and thereby bring closure to those victims' loved ones. He has the equipment, the know-how and the heart to offer his services free of charge. All that's missing is bureaucratic consent.
It has become an all-too-familiar tale in modern America — compassionate individuals offering to help those in need but being told that they can't because such responsibilities fall solely in the domain of government. The typical government line, especially in situations involving some danger, is that to allow assistance from private individuals raises concerns over safety and liability. But according to the R-J story, Schafer thinks the real obstacles are "bruised egos and red tape" — a claim supported by examples, provided in the article, of other parks around the country being much more receptive to help.
Whatever is driving this government obstruction — liability concerns, bruised egos, red tape or some combination of all three — the underlying problem is a fundamental shift, particularly pronounced in recent years, in the American mindset when it comes to helping our neighbors. George W. Bush summed up this modern way of thinking quite well when he said that "when somebody hurts, government has got to move."
The problem is that quite often, as in Schafer's case, a private individual is better positioned or even better equipped to get the job done. Recent tragedies like Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy and even the Gulf oil spill produced maddening examples of generous and skilled individuals seeing their attempts to lend help quashed by government guardians. How many people across the country are denied the help they need because those best able to provide it aren't DHS-, FEMA- or HHS-approved?
But it's not just the victims that suffer under this mindset. After all, when it becomes the government's job to move, the rest of us don't — and eventually lose the compulsion to. The result is the erosion of what has long been one of the most defining and laudable facets of the American character.
It's inspiring and heartening to know that there are still people like Steve Schafer among us. But how long until even society's most generous individuals respond to crises by channeling George Constanza: "Yeah, why would we want to help somebody?"
Thanks for reading, and I'll see you next time.
Andy Matthews
NPRI President
Will higher taxes on the "rich" solve America's budget deficit?
On the right is our country's 2011 budget deficit. Way down on the left is the amount of the higher taxes that just passed through Congress.
So do we have a revenue problem or spending problem? You decide.
(h/t Zero Hedge)
CCSD Officials: Transparent when they want to be
Hope everyone had a joyous Holiday season and Happy New Year! The blogging was a little light over the past couple weeks because of vacations and such, but it's a new year and there's a ton to write about, so let's jump right in.
CCSD's response to many legal public records requests.
Take a moment a read Paul Takahashi's piece on how the Clark County School District repeatedly denied record requests from the Las Vegas Sun.
But despite its proclamations of being transparent with the community, the district has refused to grant repeated public records requests from the Sun for graduation data from the three schools. ...
For the past four months, the Sun has been requesting that the district provide a variety of student data to demonstrate quantitatively the gains made at the turnaround schools during the 2011-12 school year.
The district complied with most of the Sun's requests for data, such as the number of discipline incidents, teacher turnover and average daily attendance rates. However, it has declined to release a key indicator of the turnaround's success: graduation rates for the class of 2012. ...
Moreover, the preliminary graduation rates — even if unverified by the state — still are public documents financed by taxpayer dollars, Smith said. Open records law specifies the district must cite a legal statute that exempts it from releasing public information.
"All records are perceived to be open unless there is a specific exception by law," Smith said. "(Graduation rates) are a matter of public record."
Although the School District claims it has no legal obligation to release graduation data because it considers them "worksheets/workpapers," nowhere in its two-page letter does it cite a state law that prohibits it from releasing this data, Smith said.
This, as NPRI knows from first-hand experience, one example of which Takahashi cited, is a disturbing pattern at CCSD. Delay or deny public records they don't want released; trumpet records they want to spin positively.
Superintendent Dwight Jones has written that the District is "committed to transparency," but CCSD hasn't lived up to his promise.
It's a new year. A great resolution for CCSD would be to comply with Nevada's Public Records law and be transparent in both word and deed.