NPRI believes that the way to improve Nevada education is to empower parents and give them more control over the education their children receive. Nevada's monolithic educational apparatus has for too long been impervious to the free-market reforms that are a prerequisite to a quality education system. NPRI's mission on education policy is to inform Nevada's citizens, elected officials and educational leaders of the need to inject free-market principles into this area of public policy.

In 1981, my five-year-old son failed kindergarten. The teacher said he was socially immature and would benefit from another year in kindergarten. As a young mother, I believed that the teacher knew best.

As Nevada’s political punditocracy spends the coming weeks reflecting on the 2007 legislative session, it’s unlikely any members will spill much ink over Senate Bill 158.

The Academy for Career Education (ACE) High School is a tuition-free, construction trades and engineering charter school for 10th- through 12th-grade students. Based in Reno, ACE offers students the opportunity to pursue an integrated academic curriculum while taking specific professional-level construction or engineering courses.

Nevada's public education system rightly demands that students do their homework, think critically and resist following the crowd in response to peer pressure.

Nevada currently finds itself in a bizarre situation in which both everyone and no one are simultaneously in charge of the state’s public K-12 education system.

Anyone who has ever taught overseas can’t help but recognize the self-serving, idiosyncratic nature of the American public education system, compared to those in other countries.

Many of Nevada's high school graduates are more inclined toward - and perhaps better suited for - an education that emphasizes technical and practical skills, rather than academics.

It was the same date, centuries ago, when a man popular to the people and dangerous to the elites walked through the Roman forum to the Senate. He would not be returning. It was the Ides of March and conspirators lay in wait.

On the Ides of March this year in Carson City, State Sens. Steven Horsford and Dina Titus unveiled their LEAPS, or Local Empowerment and Accountability for Public Schools, plan.

So whose interests, exactly, does the Clark County School District have in mind as it makes its push for full-day kindergarten?  Apparently, not the students.

One of the biggest issues set to come before the 2007 Nevada Legislature will be discrimination by the state education system against students who want to start work right after high school rather than college.