No sooner did I note the Nevada State School Board’s request for more money, mostly to increase teacher pay, than today’s editorial in the Las Vegas Review-Journal started shooting at the proposal, saying it has no chance to pass.
The editorial board wrote:
That the board would make such an outlandish demand is not surprising. Leading into each legislative session over the past decade, the board has prepared budgets that far exceed the state’s ability to pay. Of the board’s 10 members, six have ties to education, either through teaching positions or retirements from schools and colleges. From their perspective, schools can never have enough money, no matter how much they pull from your pockets.
The earlier story noted that the slide to the current average classroom size took several years. From the appearances of the earlier story, the state has not kept pace with funding needs in education. If the state board’s recommendations are not met one year, and they recommend full funding the next year, the recommendations will begin to look “outlandish.” As the needs continue to be unmet with funding, the need for funding grows — and usually such growth is not linear, but is instead exponential. Ten years of budget failure does not indicate that the current budget proposal is too large by any means. It would be the logical result of a state sliding in education capability.
One favorite target of education funding critics is the attempt to reduce classroom size, and the editorial board here put their wagon of opinion right in those ruts:
Take class-size reduction. Educators and their political allies insist that lower student-to-teacher ratios result in improved student performance. Yet they’d be hard pressed to show how the hundreds of millions spent in Nevada over the past 20 years to lower class sizes have led to significantly greater academic proficiency. The most notable changes that result from reduced class sizes are in school district budgets and teachers union membership rolls.
The State Board of Education wants to reduce the current statewide ratio of 21.4 students per teacher to 19.65, a plan that would create 2,000 new teaching positions, most of them in Clark County. And as a reward for all those new hires, the board wants to give teachers 3 percent pay raises in each of the next two years. Those raises would supplement the annual “step” increases — which average about 5 percent — awarded for experience and progress toward advanced degrees. [emphasis added]
I’ll have to dig for the study or the press release, but when I worked at the late Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI) (during Bill Bennett’s regime at Education) we published a solid study on classroom size that, as I recall, for the first time established clear results that fewer students meant improved performance. The effect of reducing classroom size started to manifest when class size dropped to 18, but really took off at 15.
The Nevada proposal would perhaps reduce class size to about 20. That’s not enough of a reduction to produce solid results. The newspaper’s pundits complain results have not been achieved, and use that as a cudgel to beat up on the request for more money.
Can we do some basic math here? The ogres on the school board — or timid mice, as the case may be — never did ask for enough money to get the results the newspaper wants to see. Instead of criticizing the board for asking for too much, the newspaper should be criticizing the board for having failed to ask for enough over the past decade.
I predict that if this budget request is successful, the results of reduced classroom size will not be large enough to please the editorial writers. That’s an easy prediction — the hoped-for class size is not small enough to hit the threshold of results. )If your physician prescribes three days of antibiotics in what should be a ten-day regimen, it’s easy to predict the infection will return with a vengeance.) If the budget request is not successful, performance won’t rise much by any other means, either — except, perhaps, if teacher pay rises enough to attract more star performers.
If the board gets beaten up by the newspapers for an “outlandish” proposal that is, again for the tenth time, too small, can you imagine what the editorial board would say if the board were to ask for enough money to get real results?
In the end, the best hope of this budget proposal is to increase the pay for Nevada’s teachers. Teachers are the deliverers of education. Since it is clear that the policy makers and opinion leaders do not have a grasp on how to manage a school system to get better results, the only hope is that the frontline workers will continue to sacrifice and make the broken system work — much as the soldiers pinned down on Omaha Beach on D-Day, realizing that the careful plans of the generals had all gone awry, determined to charge ahead and take the beach anyway, in Stephen Ambrose’s account.
Schools in Nevada make up quite a few examples in Harry Wong’s presentation on how classroom teachers can succeed (I saw Wong in late June this year). In a few cases, principals join in to help the teachers, and individual schools shine, fueled by the work of a team of teachers.
Teacher pay and classroom size don’t get mentioned in Harry Wong’s presentations as contributors to the success in Nevada. Now you know why.
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Markus
It was quite useful reading, found some interesting details about this topic. Thanks.
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Six of 10 BOE members have ties to education! How scandalous!
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[…] 08/08/2006 11:17 AM Newspaper prays for drought in Nevada education funding No sooner did I note the Nevada State School Board’s request for more money, mostly to increase teacher pay, than today’s editorial in the Las Vegas Review-Journal started shooting at the proposal, saying it has no chance to … […]
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