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Tuesday, Jan. 29, 2013 | 2:02 a.m.
Another view?
View more of the Las Vegas Sun's opinion section:
• Editorials - the Sun's viewpoint.
• Columnists - local and syndicated writers.
• Letters to the editor - readers' views.
Have your own opinion? Write a letter to the editor.
I hope everyone saw the news. This state’s schools are rated the worst in the country. Overload the classrooms and continue to put down the teachers. Cut the funding. Then try to lure new business to this state. Get real.
The schools will continue to get worse until the people who “have” step up and take the lead to properly fund the schools. If you want the best, you have to pay for it.
The casinos and the mining industry have bled this state dry. Now we are paying for it.
"The casinos and the mining industry have bled this state dry"
Bruce Karley, where along the road did you lose your grip on economic reality?
Major Nevada casinos lose $1.2 billion in 2012
http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2013/jan...
From Paul Takahashi's article "Nevada's high school graduation rate lowest among states" in the LVS on November 27th, 2012:
"White and Asian students had higher graduation rates than black and Hispanic students, sometimes by a margin of 30 percentage points.
In fact, Nevada had the second-largest disparity in graduation rates between black and white students in the country (28 percentage point gap), surpassed only by Minnesota (35 percentage point gap).
Here are the graduation rates for different student subgroups in Nevada:
Alaska Native/Native American: 52%
Asian/Pacific Islander: 74%
Black: 43%
Hispanic: 53%
Multiracial: 80%
White, non-Hispanic: 71%
Children with disabilities: 23%
Limited English-proficient students: 29%
Economically disadvantaged students: 53%"
Las Vegas Teachers- What steps need to be taken to address lower CCSD graduation rates among minorities and students with special needs including limited English-proficient students? Would tutors help including online tutoring resources?
Full disclosure: My girlfriend was an ESL(English as a second language) teacher and is now a school administrator in a school district in another state.
http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2012/nov...
The State is not last in funding building and running schools.
The money is truly wasted. The retirement benefit will bring us down.
We must move to e-schools where kids can learn from home
Several of rhe best teacher per discipline can teach scores of kids across the city on-line
Schools can be limited to test lab, computer labs, sports, chem labs, and learning centers
Other states are doing it now. When will Nevada wake up
"The only thing more expensive than education is ignorance."
Benjamin Franklin Quotes
3 suggestions: Charter schools, home schooling and school vouchers. Nevada has tried everything else and it hasn't worked. When you're last, at the bottom of the heap, what do we have to lose?
CarmineD
In reply to Bruce Karley; and the education culpability game not only continues, it expands. Surely it is fact that Nevada is one of the worst states in educating our children.
Everybody has their blame list; the kids themselves, their parents, the teachers, their administrations, the media, politicians, Vegans, and on and on and on. And now, in this already large fissure, you, Bruce Karley drags in the casinos and the mining industry into the blame game of confusion.
I'm curious to know what your logic might be, Mr. Karley. Let us say that your spouse is not doing the daily chores at home, and is going out at night and having sexual affairs with other partners. What do you do, Mr. Karley? Do you believe getting more money into the household to buy new furniture and purchase new clothing for your spouse will cure the problem at hand? Do you then go to your employer and ask for a pay raise? However, when the owner denies your request, do you blame your boss for the job not being done at your home and the infidelities being committed?
Sounds like a crazy analogy doesn't it? So does your letter to the editor. You have to look much deeper into this issue, Mr. Karley.
http://www.boston.com/news/education/k_1...
http://www.mineweb.com/mineweb/content/e...
The links provide you a path, Mr. Karley. Why not research and found out for yourself, what happened to these initiatives? Can you now see that cooperation in some form was present on the part of casinos and the mining industry? Come on now, Mr. Karley, try to save some face and put blame, if you must, in the right place.
The letter writer needs to expound on his theory, because as presented, it requires a leap of faith not supported in the letter.
The casinos provide the most union jobs in my home town here. I abhor most of their positions on issues but give the casino owners credit for a decent wage for a decent days work.
BChap, one of the links you provided (Boston. Com), was dead, repost the correct one please.
"The casinos and the mining industry have bled this state dry. Now we are paying for it."
Why do Nevadans give the gaming industry a free ride in the form of ridiculously low taxes, especially when the state badly needs more revenue? Incredibly, Pennsylvania collects more gaming taxes than Nevada, and does so from only a tiny fraction of the number of casinos.
The communist Chinese government taxes its Macau casinos at a 39% rate compared to Nevada's puny 6.75% rate. (And those higher Macau taxes haven't hurt profits for Wynn and Adelson.) That translates into $8bn for the savvy Chinese compared to $1bn for gullible Silver State hayseeds.
http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2011/oct...
There's a sucker born every minute and it seems they all live in Nevada.
The public school system is awash in money. It just chooses (or, in some court-ordered ways, is forced) to use the funds in nonproductive ways. Busing is a prime example. When did it become the taxpayers job to pay for getting the rug-rats to school and not the parents? Making parents do their job would save millions. Then there is the over reliance on what I refer to as "Modern Day Witch Doctors:" counselors, psychologists and psychiatrists. Little Jimmy scrapes a knee and some over paid counseler kisses it to make it "feel better?" Little wonder we have so many wimps. Let the kid cry. He'll get over it in no time and be wiser and more careful in the future. Geting rid of the "Modern Day Witch Doctors" would save additional millions. And, I haven't even raised the issue of bloated administrative positions. The public school system sucks and has for more than 5 decades. It's long past time to give it an honorable burial and move on to real education, not indoctrination.
Will more money make black and hispanic students study harder than asian/white/multiracial whose grad rates look okay to me? Or let's just blame anyone with deeper pockets than our own.
You can't address bad parenting, and that is the real issue.
Anchorbine:
Some families place a boatload of importance on getting a college degree, some families view a college degree in the abstract and massively unattainable.
The numbers added by Freeman this morning show that there are success stories and failures in every demographic.
What we have is a resistance to plow money into balancing and reducing the overall success rate those numbers display because a lot of people feel it is throwing good money after bad.
I think a re-education program for young parents about the importance of education, along with a strict set of guidelines for progressing to the next grade will remove the problem children from the classroom and allow the learners to flourish.
Not allowing Johnny to pass to 3rd grade if he doesn't belong there will put parents on notice early enough in life to get Johnny to become "One of the guys", rather than a kid that is lost in the system, or if mom and dad can't get Johnny under control, they will have the choice to either leave Johnny in 2nd grade for the 3rd time or pay someone to homeschool him.
It will then be mom and dads choice and dime.
Looks like CarmineD and Jeff have the best starting point worked. You could bill Mexico or other countries of origin for tutoring the non English speaking students. Move the nonfunctional students to special needs schools.
From some of the comments I've read this morning, it's apparent that many people did not learn analysis in school. Nor did they learn reading comprehension or compassion.
Comments to the effect of let the kids do online classes from home or get home schooled demonstrate a complete lack of understanding of the issues faced by the children who are most likely NOT to graduate.
When dad is a violent drunk and mom is a meth head, do you really believe these children will have an internet connection? A computer? Food? The desire to stay home all day to study? Enough silence to concentrate? A home?
Do you really believe that parents that didn't make it through high school are equipped to home school their children? How about if they are equipped but have to work 4 jobs between them to support the family? As the conservatives love to claim here the "real" unemployment rate is 20%, so how many of these families with an unemployed parent still have a home conducive to learning?
here here!!!
bruce is one smart cookie!!!
Victor has many good points but may I ask Victor what will more money do to change the fact that the childs home life is in shambles?
Why do we have to support kids that have parents that won't. I think we should do what we can to help but come one we're not having kids we can't afford or have time to take care of. Seems to me as a society we have to support people that could care less about the children they bare.
RefNV's comments are interesting. Maybe the disparity isn't due to what the school is or isn't doing, but to what the community/home is or isn't doing (like providing an environment that encourages learning and views educational accomplishments positively)? I'm not sure how we'd fix something like that, but a possible start might be to significantly reduce the time a child spends in the non-supportive environment by increasing the before and after school opportunties. Especially in elementary and middle schools. Volunteer supported activities -- tutoring, clubs, scouting, intramural sports, special events, things like that. Encourage retirees to get involved; offer community service credits to HS kids to support; look for local businesses to sponsor certain activities; involve the school PTA with identifying a "volunteer coordinator" and reaching out to the community. All at no cost to the student/family. It'd be a lot of work for the "VC", and the school would have to flex some on how they operate in order to accomodate, but the payoff could be significant.
I should add that more before/after school opportunities won't fix our under-performing system nor address the growing problem with over-promised benefit packages, but it might help address some of the problems and would be of minimal cost if handled properly (i.e. by the school PTA, not CCSD bureacracy). To reform the system, CCSD should provide a voucher for each stsudent and have the schools compete, with principals acting as CEO for the school and the PTA as the Board of Directors (and having hire/fire authority). Curricular standards would be provided by the State, with CCSD relegated to providing administrative support and facilities.
chuck333 said: "Victor has many good points but may I ask Victor what will more money do to change the fact that the childs home life is in shambles?"
Thank you.
I believe your first question was intended to be about more money to the schools because more money to the family might help. More money to the schools may or may not help. Meals in school and afterschool activities have been proven to help the most at-risk kids and keep them out of gangs. The oldsters making comments may have had it tough growing up, but most of them weren't dodging drive-bys on the way to school. If you're asking because you want my opinion, the answer is I don't know. My earlier post doesn't address the issue of money; it addresses the issue of making comments without understanding the subject matter. You've read the comments here.
Regarding your second question: "Why do we have to support kids that have parents that won't." What's the other option? Look, religion and the military want you when you're young and impressionable. Not a slam on either but the younger you are, the easier it is to get you to believe what they are teaching. It's easy to get an 8 year-old to kill someone without provocation. It's harder to get a 40 year-old to do it the first time. Consider the kidnapping of children in Africa to be used in militias.
If you get a youngster to go to school and learn there's more to life than being self-employed in a meth dealership, you might get a productive member of society. If you abandon the kid until he's incarcerated, you've just spent extra money on jail and he's unlikely to be productive and tax-paying.
You said "we're not having kids we can't afford..." If you had a kid in 2006 when both parents were in comfortable jobs and then both jobs went away in 2008, and you either couldn't get a job or you're at half pay - not uncommon these days - are you supposed to abandon your kid? No. But your lifestyle may have changed drastically. You may have moved to a loud apartment building in a crappy neighborhood because it's all you could afford.
Here's a question for you and anyone else who want to chime in. What if everyone over the age of 11 was spayed or neutered and had to prove the ability - financial and parenting skills - to raise children before having the process reversed? Let's ignore the obvious difficulties of who decides how much money is enough and what the right way to raise children is. Let's also ignore the obvious ability of people to cheat. Would this idea violate any liberal or conservative beliefs? It seems like it would address your concerns.
Relating to my 3:59 comment:
"Every time you stop a school, you will have to build a jail. What you gain at one end you lose at the other. It's like feeding a dog on his own tail. It won't fatten the dog."
Mark Twain
I would guess the big question is what are other states doing that we are not doing about our school problems? We have ranked at near bottom and now at the very bottom for many years for the worst school performance in the country.
Maybe our officials don't regard our years of being at the bottom of the heap, in our schools as a pressing issue. Is this something that we need to have open discussions about in trying to find ways to improve our schools? Surely our students and teachers deserve better.What's the fix? Someone has to have some good idea's for a solution to the lowest position in the country for our schools?
So Nevada has a hard time being successful in education. Instead, perhaps they should admit their failure and give up. They should eliminate public education:
1. It doesn't seem to be working
2. They aren't very good at it
3. They aren't very interested in improving it
4. So just stop
5. You'll have billions of dollars for the casino owners to spend electing politicians who distrust education
So, admit it, you can't do a good job and you don;t really want to.
Why stop at looking at what other States are doing? We also need to look at other countries who are producing graduates in the fields of science, engineering, technology, and mathematics. The US is so in need of high level education, and seeking to attract graduates to our shores by giving them priority immigration status.
We cannot focus only on education without a commitment to changing the economic and social disparity of our country.
At this point, I'm wondering if a major shift in financial commitment will have to be made to change the future of this country for the better.
Only when we can see the interconnect of all the areas of influence, and find a model that will serve the purpose for the good of our youth and country will we be able to rise from the ashes. It will take a good deal of courage to do such a thing.
We cannot afford to abandon and leave behind those who are disadvantaged. That group is growing.
I will go out on a limb now with the Liberty Crusaders and say that we should go to standard uniforms for all students in all schools, including teachers dressing in a professional manner, whether as a form of uniform or well tailored modest outfit. Dress establishes some equality and expectations.
Discipline, and I don't mean rulers on the hands, is an absolute necessity, as is respect for teacher and students.
If there is chronic disruption by some students, they should be removed from the schools and placed in one that has staff who have the skill and talent to turn them around.
Special needs classes/schools are also needed to help students achieve the most they are able according to their capacity.
ESL classes are not the only effort that must be made. There won't be much success if the ESL students don't have many opportunities outside of class to speak English. Just as students learning a second language will not learn much in the long run if they have no real life experience conversing with others who speak the language.
I am now bilingual because I learned that I had to live two languages. It is not uncommon for Europeans to know and speak 3-5 different languages. There are many advantages now and for the future.
In NV, we should have a growing bilingual society, but we don't utilize the opportunity that is before us.
I am certain that my thoughts will bring much disagreement, and to that I say, "OK, keep your heads in the sand and you won't get much more than sand fleas." Our youth and nation deserve better than that.
For those who are interested in seeing the comparisons of different countries in education, this link provides a jumping off point for research in the school systems.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/...