Las Vegas Sun

March 18, 2024

Union leader on future of schools under DeVos: ‘Thank God I live in Nevada’

Anne Holton at Nevada State College

Steve Marcus

Jacky Rosen, Democratic candidate for Congress, and Ruben Murillo Jr., president of the Nevada State Education Association, participate in an Education roundtable discussion at Nevada State College in Henderson Tuesday, Oct. 25, 2016.

For Ruben Murillo, it’s been a week of cautious optimism and profound dismay.

The dismay came as Murillo, the president of the Nevada State Education Association, watched the Senate confirmation hearing for Betsy DeVos, President Donald Trump’s nominee for secretary of education.

“Ms. DeVos said she never was in public schools, her children never went to public schools, and she never was an elected official,” said Murillo, who represents more than 40,000 teachers and support staff members as the head of the state teachers union. “She did say that she mentored in a public school, but I’m going to guess it was not one of the schools in our inner cities, it was probably one in an affluent area. So you have someone who is so removed from what public education is about … (that) this is the best-case example of someone who is not qualified to be in that position. If she were to get appointed, it’s going be a challenge to all public schools across the United States.”

But the positive swing in Murillo’s week came Tuesday as he heard Gov. Brian Sandoval outline more than $120 million in new investment for public schools in his annual State of the State address. Sandoval’s budget included funding for zoom and victory schools, which serve students from low-income families and in areas with high concentrations of English language learners, which the NSEA strongly supports.

Click to enlarge photo

Ruben Murillo is president of the Nevada State Education Association.

Asked how he’d rate the speech on a scale of 10, Murillo gave it an 8. Its flaw was a big one, however: Like Democrats in the Assembly and Senate, the NSEA opposes Sandoval’s call to pump $60 million into the state’s controversial Education Savings Account law. The law, which was approved along party lines in the 2015 session, provides funding for parents to send their children to private schools or home school them. It was halted in 2016 by the Nevada Supreme Court, which said the original funding mechanism for the program was illegal.

Murillo sat down with the Sun on Thursday for an interview about DeVos, Sandoval’s budget and a range of other topics. Here are excerpts from the interview:

What would have taken your rating of Sandoval’s speech to a 10?

If we could have found a way to divert the money for vouchers to other necessary areas. Also, I believe that there were programs that have been identified as important to the governor that probably could have used additional funding to expand them.

Can you give examples?

When you look at programs such as victory schools and zoom schools, you have a lot of students who aren’t able to access those programs. When you have those programs piloted in certain areas and you keep expanding, the growth is really slow and minimal. And you always have, like in a desert when you have these cracks and things fall into them, that’s what our students end up doing is falling into the cracks. And so who’s going to determine which students are going to be able to access these programs or not? Which schools are going to be eligible? So I would have loved to see more money being spent to support those programs.

Why do you oppose ESA?

When you go back to the past two legislative sessions, when school reform has been discussed and a lot of programs have been enacted, we’re almost like a laboratory where things are being thrown into a pot and we see what happens. And it’s like that old witch’s pot, where smoke is coming out and things keep being thrown into them. And some of the things that have been put out there and given a chance to grow have been zoom schools and victory schools. And for me, if you take money out of programs that are providing promising results — if you take that away to give students a way out — how are you going to give enough time for those programs to work? So for me, the Legislature really said, “OK, our priority is public schools, and here are the programs that we’re going to use to fund them, but then on the other side they’re saying, ‘We don’t really trust you, so we’re going to take our money out of public schools and give it to private schools so we know that private schools in the long run don’t best meet the needs of our inner-city schools.

So the $60 million, to you, isn’t new funding that’s in its own silo? You see it as being taken away from public education versus created for ESA?

Oh, absolutely. The governor’s budget, I believe, was about $123 million toward public education. And then an additional $60 million was for the voucher program. Imagine how many more students that $60 million could touch, and could help succeed in our public schools. It seems like we should be investing in public schools instead of divesting in them.

How do you respond to ESA proponents who say parents deserve a choice in where they send their kids to school?

I think an investment in public schools, especially magnet schools, is important. You have some really dynamic magnet schools — the career technical academies — that are successful in providing an alternative education environment for our students. By diverting this funding into private schools, you don’t have the opportunity to expand our public school offerings. Also, you’re not investing in curriculum like STEM. If the governor’s talking about the importance of workforce development, then what better program to put it in than STEM or STEAM? Because we know that our public schools are wanting to turn out graduates who are workforce ready, but investment in these programs would really help them to meet the governor’s needs.

Would you be open to any form of ESAs — for instance If there were an income cap?

At this point, no. We want money invested into public education. We want that $60 million to impact the greatest number of children. We’re in a crisis right now where, with Achievement School Districts and everything else that’s been thrown into the reform pot, they’re not being given a chance to grow. And without investing in a public education system, all we’re doing is smoke and mirrors kinds of things. And the scariest thing about all of this is there’s no accountability (for private schools). Public schools are held to a very high standard — teachers, support staff, students. You meet these test scores or otherwise you’re deemed failures.

What else will you be focusing on during the session?

One of the biggest things we need to address is the testing issue. There is way too much testing of our students, which takes away time from teaching them. We would love to have teachers’ evaluation such that we’re working more on the practice of teaching, the creativity and giving them time to teach, versus how to take a test or prepare for a test. Obviously you want to be held accountable, but we want to be held accountable but also allowed to do our jobs, so it’s not just focused on a snapshot of where you are on a test, but what are you learning?

What’s the next step on that issue?

There’s a bill draft request to do an audit of how much testing is being done and what can be done to test that issue.

Do you have ideas about which kinds of testing need to be discontinued?

I think you need to look at which tests are redundant and which tests matter. If you go and ask a teacher in a high school who gives tests, they’ll tell you stories of children who come in and say to them, “Does this test count toward my graduation? Does this test count toward scholarships?” And even if a teacher says, “All tests matter,” they’ll say, “Yeah, right.” So students are very in the know about which tests count and which don’t. So I think an audit will help give us hard data about what tests are valuable, which tests work and which tests give teachers the information they need to do their job.

How are you feeling about the future of education under the Trump administration?

Thank God I live in Nevada. We’re all going to have to face the consequences of this next new secretary of education, assuming she’s appointed. But the fact that we were successful in electing pro-public education candidates was really a big positive. Now, the reality is that Friday will be a dark day for public education.

What’s the likely outcome?

The likely outcome is that she’s appointed, and it’s time to organize. It’s a time for our parents and our communities to organize and say, “We don’t need you telling us how to organize our schools.” It’s like with the Achievement School Districts. You saw a wonderful outpouring of parents saying, “Our schools may be struggling, but we want to maintain control of them. We don’t want to turn them over to for-profit charters.” So we need to tap into that.

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