A formula for failure: Growth, lack of funding hamper education system

By Steve Kanigher

Monday, May 12, 2003 | 11 a.m.

Editor's note: This is the second in a seven-part series.

Whether the topic is per-pupil spending, state support for kindergarten through 12th grade instruction, high school dropouts, pupil-teacher ratios or grade school test scores, Nevada falls short of most other states.

In public education comparisons conducted by the federal government, scholastic associations and publications, Nevada consistently fails to make the grade.

The reason for much of this, according to students, educators and outside experts, is that education is not a high enough priority for Nevadans. The state's rapid population growth also shares the blame.

Last week the Clark County School Board approved a potential budget for fiscal 2004 that would include $111 million in cuts if Gov. Kenny Guinn's proposal to raise state taxes is not passed by the 2003 Legislature.

In addition to reducing schools to four-day weeks, the possible budget cuts would include middle school athletics, graduation ceremonies, elementary school librarian assistants and literacy specialists.

Education advocates say that Nevada's public schools desperately need more funding, not less.

In one highly publicized study from the U.S. Census Bureau, Nevada ranked 45th among states -- 46th if Washington, D.C., is included -- in per-pupil spending during 2001, $1,506 per student below the national average.

A 2001 National Education Association survey ranked Nevada last in state government support for kindergarten through 12th grade education, and the publication Education Week ranked Nevada 46th in a 2000 study in the percentage of taxable resources spent on education. Clark County School Superintendent Carlos Garcia said all Nevadans ought to be as disgusted as he is with those rankings.

"How can we be $1,500 per student below average and keep up with growth?" Garcia said. "People believe that if you add money to education, it's going down a black hole and won't solve the problems. My response is: How do you know if you've never tried it? We want to be held accountable."

Garcia said he supports Guinn's budget request for the next biennium because it would help the school district in the short run.

Garcia said the next step, and one that could take several legislative sessions, would be for the state to update its education funding formula to better account for growth and inflation.

"The formula does not necessarily account for inflation or growth because no one ever envisioned that we would grow so rapidly," Garcia said. "We don't expect the Legislature to address all of this in one session, but we'd like them to take chunks out of it. You've got to start somewhere."

Safer campuses

Valley High School senior Zlatan Alibasic said Nevada could start with more money for school police and restroom supplies.

More security guards would keep campuses safer, and more attention to the restrooms would give students the opportunity to perform one of the basic practices for good hygiene and good health -- hand-washing, he said.

"They don't always have the towels and soap that are needed," he said.

If the schools can provide a safe, healthy learning environment, there would be more learning going on, he said.

Educators say insufficient funding coupled with nation-leading growth are the main reasons Nevada ranks among the highest in the student-teacher ratio numbers nationwide while ranking low in test scores for fourth and eighth graders.

Last year Nevada had the nation's fifth highest overall ratio of students to teachers from kindergarten through 12th grade, according to the U.S. Education Department.

In Clark County, that ratio is so high in ninth through 12th grade classes -- 32 to 1 on average -- that the school district's high schools have been threatened with loss of accreditation, according to Agustin Orci, deputy superintendent of instruction.

"If we lose our high school accreditation, that would be devastating for students trying to get to college. Some colleges, such as in the Ivy League, take kids only from accredited schools," Orci said.

Despite the risk, the overcrowded classes remain.

"Our class sizes shoot up at grade four and again at the middle and high schools," Orci said. "Those class sizes have increased more than we've wanted. It creates some terrible inequities.

"One time I went to Rancho High School and there were six kids in an advanced placement physics class. Next door there were 45 kids in an English as a Second Language class," Orci said.

Butler said he has taken advanced placement courses with as few as nine students but is in a photography class with 40 others.

"There's constant interruption," he said of large classes. "You can't get individual attention because everyone is asking questions. It's not as efficient as it could be. Having a maximum of 20 to 25 students would be more efficient."

Orci said the large classes are a major factor in Nevada's relatively poor showing in National Assessment of Educational Progress tests of fourth and eighth graders in core subjects such as reading and math. In 1998 and 2000, the latest rankings available, Nevada's students generally ranked in the bottom third and worse in some instances.

Kenneth Lange, executive director of the Nevada State Education Association and a member of a governor's task force that recommended a broader tax base, said Nevada fourth and eighth graders have to "transcend a lack of resources that other states provide to their kids."

"It tracks back to the funding issue," Lange said. "What you'll see in higher-proficiency schools are smaller classes along with more experienced teachers and support for school resources. You have a textbook to take home, which a lot of our kids don't have. I have seen sections of textbooks copied for kids here."

Nevada should have been investing heavily in education for the past six years, Lange said.

"We're No. 1 in the capacity to raise taxes, but we're dead last in effort. Historically, our tax structure has not allowed us to provide basic resources for education. Money has been found over the years for other priorities. Education just receives a lot of lip service.

"In 1997 and 1999, when we were running surpluses, there was money raised by school taxes that, because of the funding formula, went into the general fund for pork projects. We received $30 million one year for computers and training when we could have used $100 million."

'We're cheap'

Garcia was blunt about why Nevada ranks low in education funding.

"I think we're cheap," he said. "Everyone needs to look in a mirror and blame themselves. This didn't happen overnight. There's a lack of vision to solve these issues. We need to get beyond the Band-Aid approach."

Silverado High School junior James Jobin said the problem is not hard for him to figure out.

"Nevada is a tourism state that does not value education," Jobin said. "People don't anticipate staying here long. Our Legislature seems to value casinos on the Strip more than education. Legislators get campaign contributions from casinos but students can't contribute."

"If you want to dare to be somebody, you've got to go to a different state," Jobin said.

"We have a Millennium Scholarship, but all you need is a 3.0 grade point average. That's not exactly reaching for the stars," he said. "There's a number of jobs on the Strip. We don't need to strain for those jobs. The teachers here aren't demanding of the students because of the low level of expectations placed on us."

Jobin said parents often don't put an emphasis on education because many of them are employed by casinos in jobs that did not require much education.

The lack of school funding and the large class sizes that reduce the amount of individual attention students receive, combined with the relatively large number of well-paying jobs in Nevada that don't require a college education, are cited as reasons why the state has had one of the nation's highest percentages of high school dropouts.

"The number of high-paying jobs is a factor in Las Vegas. It's relatively easy to get a parking job or other hotel jobs, but those are not lasting things."

Different organizations have calculated different dropout rates for Nevada. While the numbers have varied, the conclusions have been the same: It's worse here than most other states.

Education Week reported in 2000 that Nevada had the nation's highest percentage of 16- to 19-year olds who were high school dropouts: 16 percent. The national average was 9.8 percent. The national organization Kids Count, which is funded by the Annie E. Casey Foundation in Baltimore, reported the same year that Nevada's rate was 13 percent and that the national average was 11 percent. Both surveys said their figures represented those teens who had dropped out of high school either in 2000 or in previous years.

Education Week also found in 2000 that 6.2 percent of Nevada's ninth through 12th graders dropped out of school that year, the nation's third highest percentage. Nevada Kids Count, a nonprofit advocacy group, reported in March that the state's dropout rate dipped to 5 percent in 2001, its lowest rate since Nevada began keeping track in 1987.

But last week the Nevada Education Department reported that the high school dropout rate during the 2001-02 school year was back up to 6.3 percent. That report noted that 6,136 ninth through 12th graders had dropped out of school. Twelfth graders had a dropout rate of 13.5 percent, followed by ninth graders (5 percent), 10th graders (4.4 percent) and 11th graders (2.8 percent).

Hispanic children traditionally have higher dropout rates than other youths, according to national surveys, and in the latest state survey, the Hispanic dropout rate was 9 percent, highest among racial and ethnic groups.

Nevada also happens to have the nation's fifth highest percentage of children ages 5 to 17 who have difficulty speaking English, according to the national Kids Count organization. Unless there are drastic changes in Nevada's public schools, that's a huge group of students who are being set up to fail, experts say.

Margarita Rebollal urged the Clark County School District to hire more qualified teachers equipped to teach English as a Second Language courses. The executive director of the East Las Vegas Community Development Corp., a nonprofit group that builds affordable housing for low-income residents, said many ESL teachers are not qualified to teach that subject.

"There aren't enough qualified teachers in any of the fields in Las Vegas," Rebollal said. "The other problem is that they dump ESL kids at different levels into the same classroom. That holds back the ones who have the best chance of moving ahead."

Decent buildings, just too crowded

One of the few categories in which Nevada's public schools compare favorably to other states is the quality of school buildings. A 2001 survey by the American Society of Civil Engineers indicated that Nevada school buildings have relatively few problems.

Fred Smith, the district's construction manager and interim assistant superintendent for facilities, said its not hard to figure out why.

"We have 277 schools in Clark County and 147 have been built since 1986," Smith said. "We are a relatively new district as far as our buildings are concerned. We also have a relatively friendly climate other than the extended heat. We don't have a lot of freeze and thaw that damage buildings."

The survey also found that the plumbing in Nevada's schools was the best in the nation, but that was offset by another finding in the survey -- that there aren't enough restrooms, water fountains or other types of plumbing for the size of the schools.

Another 2001 study by Education Week revealed that Nevada ranked near the bottom in the number of schools with fewer than 350 elementary school students, 800 middle school students or 900 high school students.

Clark County builds its schools to handle 720 elementary school students, 1,700 middle school students and 2,700 high school students, although the district has been known to exceed those figures by large margins.

"We would love to build schools for a smaller school population," Smith said. "All the research says that students perform better in small schools. But we're fighting to stretch our dollars. We will continue to build large schools because they're cheaper to build on a cost-per-student basis."

Other statistics revealed that Nevada teachers make better than average pay but were less likely to have majored in the subjects that they teach. Education Week reported that in 2001 Nevada teachers ranked ninth in average salary at $47,384 and sixth in average starting salary at $31,508 with cost of living as part of the equation.

But Lange, whose organization represents teachers, disputed those findings. He said the cost of living factor could be skewed -- and said that Nevada teacher salaries were merely average. The average teacher salary in Nevada was $43,000 and the average starting salary was $26,800, he said.

He also disputed a 2000 survey from Education Week that ranked Nevada 38th in the percentage of secondary school teachers who majored in the subjects that they taught. A separate 2000 survey from Education Trust, a nonprofit advocacy group in Washington, ranked Nevada as having the ninth highest percentage of secondary school classes taught by teachers who lacked a major or minor in the field.

"That doesn't ring true at all," Lange said. "We have an exceptionally high level of teachers. We have a high number of teachers with master's degrees."

Orci said a problem for the school district is the high degree of turnover among teachers, especially those with little experience. The problem is particularly acute in the schools that are the neediest academically, he added.

"We have 1,500 new teachers every year, and the vast majority have little or no experience," Orci said. "It takes two to three years for a new teacher to become a great teacher. We also have to deal with teachers who leave the system because they have retired or become disillusioned.

"It creates situations where schools keep getting new teachers and don't retain an experienced staff. It's difficult to maintain continuity.

"If you're a kid with a teacher who has only a year or two of experience, you probably won't do as well as a kid who has a teacher who has 10 years of experience," Orci said.

And despite the state's years of experience with its faltering public education system, the current Legislature is not expected to do much about it, Orci and others said. Many problems that hold back Nevada's educational system won't lessen until the state broadens its tax base, many community leaders say.

Glen Arnodo, Culinary Union Local 226 political director, is one who shares that opinion. The Culinary Union, which represents food servers, cocktail waitresses and other gaming industry workers, is urging the Nevada Legislature to approve a new broad-based business tax to help solve the state's budget crisis.

"We don't have the type of tax base that would allow us to fund education at an adequate level," Arnodo said. "We were 45th in funding during reasonably good economic times, so what are we going to be during a budget crisis?

"Education isn't something that has been valued as much as it should be. You end up with a disaster when you're 45th in spending. We can either have one of the worst education systems in the country or fix things and do something about it."