Sunday, May 21, 2023 | 2 a.m.
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Every child deserves a quality education and an opportunity for future success. But with less than a month left in the legislative session, Gov. Joe Lombardo is pursuing a deplorable course of action that will profoundly weaken public education.
He’s engaged in a full-court press to shift taxpayer dollars to private schools that predominantly serve wealthy families while leaving the majority of Nevada’s students behind. The net effect would be to line Lombardo’s wealthy backers’ pockets with our tax dollars while shortchanging children throughout the state. He’s even threatening to veto the state budget and send the economy into a tailspin in order to force the taxpayers to foot the bill for his donors’ children’s private school tuition.
The Democratic-controlled Legislature has already compromised and agreed with roughly 90% of Lombardo’s proposed budget. Lombardo should be thanking them. Instead, he is behaving like a dictator and demanding that his fellow elected representatives ignore their constituents and bend to his will.
In March, the governor introduced a package of education-related bills that focused on providing more options for parents to take their children, and the taxpayer dollars used to fund their children’s education, out of public schools and send them to private or charter schools.
One proposal would create an Office of School Choice within the Nevada Department of Education, a taxpayer funded marketing and public relations office designed to promote private schools.
How can this possibly be an acceptable use of taxpayer dollars? If private schools want to market themselves, they should use some of the massive tuition that makes them too expensive for low-income families and hire a marketing firm.
Moreover, Lombardo’s plan all but abandons rural families and their children because they don’t have access to private schools where they live.
Another Lombardo proposal would allow charter schools to use public money to bus students to and from campus, effectively forcing taxpayers to subsidize even the transport costs for wealthy families to send their kids to private schools. It’s absurd. Yet Lombardo is willing to shut down Nevada’s government in his fight to give away taxpayer dollars to the rich.
If you get the impression that our governor wants to stack the deck against hardworking families and their children to benefit the wealthy and private schools, you’re on the right track.
His most contentious proposal creates a massive expansion of the Nevada Educational Choice Scholarship Program, also known as “Opportunity Scholarships,” from $6.6 million annually to approximately $50 million in the next biennium to a projected $500 million just 10 years from now. The current Opportunity Scholarship program serves predominantly low- and middle-income families with household incomes of $60,000 or less and cannot be used by families making more than $90,000. Lombardo’s proposal would raise the cap to $150,000.
The result is $493 million every year that is currently in public education that would be given to families potentially earning six-figure incomes to spend on enriching private-school administrators.
While advocates for school choice use semantics to argue that no taxpayer dollars are spent directly on private school tuition, this argument is extremely misleading. The money for the vouchers is not distributed directly from government coffers, but it is paid for entirely with public funds via a 100% tax credit for any business that sponsors a scholarship program. The need to lie about the program betrays the weakness of its policy merits.
Proponents argue that the vouchers provide opportunities for low-income students to attend small, elite academic institutions where they can receive more individualized attention and realize their academic potential. But the Nevada Department of Education found that among low-income students using opportunity vouchers, only 26% saw increases in their standardized test scores after transferring from a public school to a private school. A third of the students using vouchers saw their scores decrease.
Meanwhile, 95% of students receiving Opportunity vouchers attend private religious schools that may deny admission to any student for almost any reason. This means that students with disabilities or those needing individual education plans or adaptive learning technologies can be turned away simply because a private school doesn’t want to accommodate that student’s needs.
And yet again, all of this leaves rural Nevadans high and dry because they don’t have the population density to attract for-profit schools.
Similarly, LGBTQ+ students, students with LGBTQ+ parents, students or parents who are active in women’s rights organizations or anyone who doesn’t believe in any other specific religious doctrine may be turned away without recourse. This is not an appropriate use of public money.
The U.S. Constitution specifically prohibits the government from establishing an official religion or prohibiting the free exercise of a religion. Taxpayer dollars shouldn’t be used to fund schools that admit or deny students based on religious beliefs.
Public schools don’t have the option to turn away a student simply because they’re gay, learn in a different way or practice a different religion. Public money should not be taken from schools that strive to teach all students and given to a hand-picked few from mostly wealthy families who don’t like having to be in the same building as people who are different from them.
It should not be lost on any of us that the expansion of the American public education system in the 20th century was a bedrock development that was a direct contributor to the greatness of our economy.
We agree that education needs to be improved. The answer isn’t Lombardo’s dream of creating a world of education haves and have-nots where his rich cronies rake in our tax dollars like autumn leaves.
The proper answer is to expand the resources and spending — including teacher salaries — to make Nevada’s public education system greater than ever. That’s true nationwide and especially true in Nevada, which has long allowed public education to languish compared with other states.
Lombardo knows this but prefers to send our tax dollars to a narrow group of wealthy people and also to unaccountable and ineffective private institutions. The governor’s welfare-for-the-rich scheme is not simply wrong, he’s wrong in a craven and unprincipled way.
There is one right answer here and only one. We should fund public schools so well — and support education so fully — that no parent feels the need for private education.
This is the way to ensure that all of Nevada’s children have access to high-quality opportunities for education. And that, in turn, ensures our state remains one of the most desirable in the nation to attract businesses and families.
