Nevadans hear regularly that we’re 49th or 50th among the states in K-12 education. Critics and reformers say so to support their policy proposals. Apologists and “educrats” say it to support more funding for public schools. The good news is the narrative that education in Nevada is last or nearly-last is false. Things are not great, but not nearly as dire as partisans claim.
A new report from The Heritage Foundation uses different metrics. Conventional metrics heavily weight spending in support but Heritage focuses on three inputs: school choice, transparency and regulatory freedom; and one output, return on investment for education spending. They use broad measures of each criterion, assessed via rigorous metrics. Their first annual Education Report Card (ERC) puts Nevada 25th overall in state K-12 education.
The Reason Foundation’s new Education Spending Spotlight, analyzing data through 2020 (thus, before effects of the COVID pandemic), shows Nevada 41st in growth of per-pupil funding this century and 40th in overall 2020 per-pupil funding. And the 2019 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP, “the nation’s report card”) lists Nevada’s eighth-grade reading rank at 43rd, while mathematics scores are 44th. Nevada’s recent low ACT scores are probably outliers due to the COVID shutdowns.
Nevada’s 2019 Controller’s Annual Report (CAR) stated: “To improve the effectiveness of its education spending, Nevada must allocate that spending toward programs that have been shown to boost student achievement. … families are the consumers of public education, and each individual family is most familiar with its specific needs.” Heritage’s ERC criteria meet these points and suggest Nevada is doing somewhat better than conventional metrics indicate, albeit still only in the middle of the pack. (Full disclosure: As Controller, I wrote the 2019 report, which was the last CAR.)
The CAR also said: “Strong evidence exists that technology-assisted learning leads to better student outcomes while also easing the workload on classroom teachers so they can more easily manage larger classes.” In that vein, the ERC highlights a 2006 quote from Nobel economist Milton Friedman, the father of education freedom, especially vouchers for parental choice:
“There’s no reason to expect that the future market will have the shape or form that our present market has. How do we know how education will develop? Why is it sensible for a child to get all his or her schooling in one brick building? Why not add partial vouchers? Why not let them spend part of a voucher for math in one place and English or science somewhere else? Why should schooling have to be in one building? Why can’t a student take some lessons at home, especially now, with the availability of the Internet?”
Nevada’s strong point in Heritage’s ERC rankings is the student achievement variable, return on investment for educational spending, where we land 10th. The key return fact is that, overall, Nevada gets better scores on the NAEP per dollar spent than 40 other states. Our middling score is transparency, where Nevada ranks 24th. The ERC warns: “Nevada lawmakers have not adopted proposals to increase academic transparency or that reject the prejudice caused by the application of critical race theory in schools.”
Nevada’s K-12 education weak spots are school choice and regulatory freedom, which both rank 37th. Although Nevada has legislated broad school choice, it is not funded. Regulatory freedom emphasizes alternative methods of teacher certification besides college-based education degrees. We also need to end Common Core assessments and stop growth of non-teaching staff.
How did other states fare? The top dozen are mostly southern and western red states: Florida, Arizona, Idaho, Indiana, South Dakota, Mississippi, West Virginia, Montana, Louisiana, Tennessee, Utah and Texas. The bottom dozen are mainly eastern and western blue states: New York (last), New Jersey, Maryland, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Alaska, Rhode Island, Washington, Illinois, Hawaii, Oregon and Minnesota. We should adopt what the first group does right and avoid what the others do wrong.
Ron Knecht is Senior Policy Fellow at Nevada Policy Research Institute.
