Giving educators flexibility

Thursday, July 31, 2008 | 2:04 a.m.

It makes perfect sense to encourage public schools to improve their performance each year. It is also a worthy goal to strive for educational parity among students regardless of their race or ethnicity or the income of their parents.

Yet the deservedly ridiculed No Child Left Behind law keeps on finding ways to take flexibility away from state education agencies and public school districts.

A good example appeared in a story in Sunday’s Las Vegas Sun by reporter Emily Richmond, who wrote about concerns that the law does not allow for efficient use of support teams to monitor struggling schools.

Under the law, the Nevada Education Department must dispatch support teams of educators and parents to monitor schools that fail to show adequate improvement over a four-year period. While the purpose is to develop plans for improvement, the flaw is that some schools that actually improve are downgraded for minor reasons, such as having 94 percent of students show up for a test rather than the required 95 percent.

What this means is that teams are often sent to schools that don’t need the oversight, resulting in an absolute waste of tax dollars and a further stretching of resources that are already spread too thin. What sense is there in that?

The state spent nearly $1.2 million to send teams to 86 schools during the past school year. That cost, triple what it was during the 2005-06 school year, is certain to go up because it is estimated that roughly 100 schools will need teams in the coming school year.

With the law up for reauthorization by Congress, No Child Left Behind is in dire need of an overhaul.

One improvement would be to allow the state education department to dispatch support teams only to those schools that truly need the help. To continue to do otherwise would be a disservice to the dedicated professionals who are working hard to produce better students in Nevada.