Five years into the worst recession since at least the Great Depression, the union bosses at the Clark County Education Association had a choice. Accept a pay freeze for two years, which actually included one year of pay increases for education steps or choose to increase teacher salaries and force the Clark County School District to lay off 1,000+ teachers.

Think about that. Five years into this recession, which has hit Nevada harder than any other state, CCSD wouldn't have had to lay off a single teacher if CCEA had agreed to a salary freeze that actually included a one-year salary increase from some teachers! (Ironically, laying off CCSD's 1,000 worst teachers would have been a boon to student achievement, except that CCEA union bosses ensured almost all layoffs will happen by seniority.)

We all know people who've lost their jobs. Nevada has one of the highest foreclosure rates in the country. NPRI has heard from businessmen and women who've had 60+ percent drops in revenue, have lost hundreds of thousands of dollars and been forced to lay off dozens of employees.

Even so, in the midst of this economy, there would have been no teacher layoffs if union bosses had been willing to accept a pay freeze that actually included a one-year pay increase for some employees.

And this is going to be  the evidence that Nevada's education system needs more funding? Because CCSD couldn't afford two years worth of raises five years into the worst economy in decades and union bosses decided they'd prefer salary increases to saving teacher jobs?

You've got to be kidding me.

And this is on top of Nevada nearly tripling inflation-adjusted, per-pupil spending in the last 50 years while educational achievement has been stagnant.


Educational improvement will only come from real education reforms, not rewarding CCEA union bosses for choosing pay increases over teacher positions.

CCSD Superintendent Dwight Jones warned that an unelected, unaccountable arbitrator from California rewarding the Clark County Education Association's stall tactics would lead to 1,000 pink slips, and here they are. Via the Las Vegas Review-Journal:

Class sizes will increase and more than 1,000 teachers will be laid off if the Clark County School Board adopts its proposed budget tonight.

The School District must cut $60 million in spending. Officials had planned on saving that money by freezing teacher pay. But the Clark County Education Association, the teacher's union, fought that plan. An arbitrator ruled in the union's favor.

As a result, according to a memo sent out Wednesday, 1,015 teacher positions will be eliminated. This will result in classes increasing by about two or three students each.

Now, as Agenda co-host Elizabeth Crum noted today when I was a guest on her show, 1,015 layoffs doesn't mean that those 1,015 employees won't have a job in CCSD next year. Pink slips will be given to 1,015 CCSD workers, but after teachers retire or leave, some or all of those teachers will be hired back, although there will be 1,015 fewer positions next year.

This led to a couple of unintentional hilarious tweets from the Nevada State Education Association, including this one.



This is funny, because emphasizing the number of layoffs and ignoring vacancies and unfilled positions mitigating those layoffs is exactly what union bosses do during legislative sessions to ratchet up pressure for increasing education funding.

Also, NSEA has just said or at least implied that reducing 1,015 positions is a scare tactic, even though eliminating 1,015 positions means larger class sizes! The implication being that NSEA thinks there's no reason to be scared of larger class sizes.

And on this, NSEA would be right — even though I don't think that's what the NSEA union bosses intended — because eliminating CCSD's 1,015 worst teachers would be a boon to student achievement.

Why?

Because a teacher is the most important school-controlled factor in student achievement. Students with an excellent teacher learn 18 months of material in one year; students with an ineffective teacher learn 6 months of material in one year. Some people want "smaller classes," but the most important school-controlled factor in student learning is teacher quality, not class size.

Unfortunately, CCEA union bosses prevented this from happening, because they ensured that after 32 teachers were laid off for disciplinary reasons, layoffs will occur based on seniority.

So CCSD's seven best new teachers will be rewarded with pink slips, students will lose two to four months worth of learning next year and the dance of the lemons will continue. All because union bosses succeeded in protecting ineffective teachers that harm the learning of your children.



If you like this system, thank the union bosses at the NSEA and CCEA.

If you want a better system, the need to eliminate or, at least, seriously reform collective bargaining for public-sector unions and to offer school choice for all parents has never been clearer.

Second, you're fired.

That doesn't make any sense, does it? Of course not, but thanks to a recent victory for the union bosses in the Nevada State Education Association and the Clark County Education Association that's exactly what's happening.

Last week, the seven teachers listed above were honored by the CCSD Board of Trustees as the best new teachers in the District. While these teachers received plaques applauding their accomplishments, they are among the lowest teachers on the seniority totem pole.

Regardless, after an unelected, unaccountable arbitrator from California rewarded CCEA's stalling tactics by siding with the union in arbitration, CCSD announced it would be forced to lay off up to 1,000 teachers. Thanks to the efforts of union bosses to preserve seniority in layoffs, only 38 teachers with disciplinary problems will be released before seniority-based layoffs begin.

Since there are less than 850 first year teachers, seven of CCSD's best new teachers will be getting pink slips.

This means that, unless attrition allows CCSD to hire these teachers back, hundreds of children — and these could be your children — will have less effective teachers and that hundreds of children will learn less next year.

Thanks union bosses!

Students vs. union. Your child vs. union bosses. An effective education for your child or dues for the Nevada State Education Association.

Those are the stakes. Those are the sides.

We stand with students.

Where do you stand?

There's been a lot of attention focused recently on the need to fire bad teachers. That this is a controversial statement is pretty amazing, but such is the power of the union bosses of the Nevada State Education Association and its county-based affiliates.

In a recent letter to the editor in the Las Vegas Sun, CCSD teacher Jeremy M. Christensen started his letter with this.

We must fire bad teachers. Taxpayers good, teachers bad.

Wait ... what? How does that make any sense? It doesn't of course. This would be like saying teacher Jeremy M. Christensen uses faulty logic; therefore all teachers use bad logic.

Both are non sequiturs.

Christensen continues:

Clark County has some of the largest class sizes in nation, with some of least involved parents and most transient families. Is it safe to assume that if you increase the workload on any employee that at some point that employee’s effectiveness would decline? Can a doctor cure 200 patients in a day? Can a teacher change the lives of 180 students in day? ... Some of my students have been accepted to Yale, Stanford, Northwestern, UCLA and many other fine universities this year because they are good students; some of them have good parents and all of them had some good teachers. Congratulations to them and their families and their school.

No one is going to deny that there are many factors in a student's achievement that a school can't control — wealth or poverty of a student's family, parental involvement, if English is their first or second language or even a student's motivation.

But there are also many factors a school can control and of those factors, teacher quality is single the most important one. As Nevada's Superintendent of Public Instruction Dr. James W. Guthrie notes, "Terminating the lowest five percent of ineffective teachers and replacing them with teachers who are only average in effectiveness would of itself elevate U.S. achievement to among the highest in the industrial world."

That's why teacher quality is so important. And pointing that out doesn't mean you think all teachers are bad — it's precisely because we know how important good teachers are to your children that we must work so hard to remove or improve the ineffective ones.

Fact: Nevada's nearly tripled inflation-adjusted, per-pupil spending on education in the last 50 years.


But according to liberal columnist Steve Sebelius, Nevada has yet to throw money into its educational system.

We can't ignore that some blame from the present crisis belongs in Carson City, where the Nevada Legislature has repeatedly failed to create an adequate tax system to fund the state's schools properly. While the Legislature did find the time in 2011 to enact modest reforms to teacher tenure (reforms that were passed with Democratic support, it should be noted), discussions about a broad-based tax system were fumbled. Teachers and the school district argue over scarce resources, yet mining companies pay a pittance while the price of gold soars, and businesses pay nothing on their gross receipts despite repeated recommendations by experts that they be taxed.

We can do better. We can get a better tax system, we can reduce dropout rates and increase graduation rates. We can improve test scores. Money isn't the only factor in that success, but it cannot happen without money.

And for those about to take to their keyboards to say throwing money at the problem won't help, I ask this: Why don't we at least try it first? (Emphasis added)

Sebelius is hardly alone in claiming Nevada needs to spend more on education, even though Nevada, you know, has nearly tripled inflation-adjusted, per-pupil spending in the last 50 years.

Last week, an unelected, unaccountable arbitrator from California