Gov. Gibbons’ proposed empowerment program for education appears to have some merit, but to call this a “school choice” program is rather misleading. When asked by Reno Gazette-Journal reporter Anjeanette Damon if the “school choice” reference in his State of the State about the empowerment program was another way of saying “vouchers,” the governor said no.
“If a school is not performing, I think a parent should have a choice on which school to attend,” Gibbons said.
But the “choice” continues to be from the current list of government-run public schools. Which is kinda like saying you can have the car in any color you want…as long as it’s black.
The fact is, parents will not be “empowered” to pull their kids out of mediocre or failing public schools and send them to better private or parochial schools of THEIR choice. The education dollars under the proposed empowerment program aren’t actually following the child, you see, but control would be shifted from the district bureaucracy to the in-school bureaucracy. Likely a better alternative, but hardly empowered parental school choice.
Another difference in empowerment schools appears to be half-hour longer school days and five additional school days a year. But if the problem is lousy education standards and non-challenging curricula, this change simply means an extra 30 minutes a day and five days a year of sub-standard instruction.
And while “merit pay” has been proposed, the teachers unions will still be mucking around these empowerment schools and will do everything in their power to block the notion of paying exceptional teachers more than mediocre ones. Or giving extra money to reward teaching excellence without giving a little swag to the school secretary and janitor, as well.
We can’t know any of this for sure because, well, the Gibbons administration doesn’t seem to know how the program will work yet either. “It (the program) is under development,” Gibbons told Damon. “The details you are asking have to be worked out.”
This is not a very good way to sell a new product to an already skeptical consumer.
Posted on January 24th, 2007 by Chuck Muth
Filed under: Nevada
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