My mom was a teacher, though she ended up a certified Marriage and Family Therapist. When we discuss politics and education, she fondly recalls when the NEA was a professional association dedicated to improving the craft rather than a union dedicated to muscling taxpayers and voters.
Apparently, she is not alone. I got this press [...]

Some community leaders suggest Nevada should set a collective goal of increasing our K-12 school spending so that we are one of the top-ten spending states.
That set me wondering what kind of performance increase we could expect from our schools if we did that.
So, using the NCES 2004/2005 “Current” spending per student data (which, alone, [...]

The Clark County School District offers a chart showing how much CCSD administrators get paid.
Seventeen rows and seven columns. What are all those rows and columns?
That starting range for assistant principals in elementary schools is step 40. Elementary principals run from step 41 to 44. Yet the chart includes rows for steps 36, 37, 38 [...]

Continuing with the National Center for Education Statistics 04/05 dataset, which, according to CCSD quoted in the Las Vegas Sun, uses a classification system that violates NCES guidelines thus rendering the current/non-current subcategories useless for comparing Nevada to other states, an alert reader writes:
The last paragraph of the Sun article was very puzzling: “Beers, who [...]

Emily Richmond, the veteran education reporter at the Las Vegas Sun, was probably handed a difficult assignment by her editors yesterday morning: kill Beers.
On Monday, my campaign sent out a press release detailing how I had looked at new data (for the 04/05 school year) available from the US Dept. of Education’s “National Center For [...]

Nevada doesn’t rank 47th, 48th or 49th in education spending, as proponents of higher taxing and spending claim.
We actually rank 37th in education spending - at least we ranked 37th for the 2004/2005 school year anyway. That is the latest data from the National Center for Education Statistics run by the federal government. This is [...]

Chip Mosher is probably a name that is not familiar to most voters in Senate District 6. He teaches English clear across the valley, at an at-risk high school.
I first met Chip four or five years back. He’s quite a character, writes an occasionally profane piece for the physically striking Steve Sebelius‘ weekly newspaper, and [...]