EDITORIAL: ‘Transfer of responsibility’ red flags

The flight from accountability goes on at the Clark County School District.

Less than one week after Superintendent Jesus Jara agreed to continue in the job after being fired and unfired, the School Board approved an agenda item involving the “transfer of responsibilities” from individual campuses to the district’s central office. In other words, to limit the authority of principals on the ground and empower district administrators.

This would seem to run counter to a two-year legislative effort culminating in a 2017 law that sought to decentralize decision-making in the nation’s fifth-largest school district. Given that there was absolutely no political will to break up the district into smaller, more manageable sectors, the effort was intended to shift authority to those closest to students on individual campuses.

Predictably, the law met immediate resistance from defenders of the status quo, including the School Board. Last year, the principals union filed a lawsuit arguing that the district was undermining the ability of school chiefs to hire their own teachers under the statute. During the 2019 legislative session, Mr. Jara made an ill-fated push to take leftover funds from principals, punishing fiscal responsibility.

None of this should be a surprise. For decades, while state and Clark County test scores have languished, the state education establishment has fought vociferously against any reforms or policies designed to impose accountability on the district. In addition to the reorganization bill, the list is revealing:

■ A proposal to ensure that Nevada schoolchildren reach reading proficiency by the end of third grade was butchered and mutilated before it could ever be implemented.

■ The state’s high school graduation exam — an eighth-grade level test — was abandoned after too many students were unable to achieve a passing score. The replacement proposal, so-called “end-of-course” assessments to measure the basic aptitude of graduating students, was dropped eventually.

■ A proposal to strengthen teacher evaluations by including a significant student performance metric was significantly diluted and then neutered by bureaucratic inertia. As a result, the system remains dysfunctional, with only 25 of 20,000 teachers rated as ineffective for the 2017-18 school year.

■ Efforts to put competitive pressures on the public schools through education savings accounts that let families use a portion of state per-pupil funding on other schooling options were gutted by legislative Democrats. They have also financially starved a choice scholarship program for underprivileged kids.

School Board members insist that the “transfer of responsibilities” move applies only to specific items, such as utilities and trash disposal, landscape maintenance, truancy enforcement, certain transportation services and other matters. But the agenda item explains that agreements will be maintained with individual principles only when they can be reached “in support of providing equitable and adequate services to all students.”

That’s a large caveat that could be used in the future to water down the intent of the reorganization bill, particularly if one principal is more adept at managing resources than another, as will inevitably be the case.

In addition, as the lone dissenting board member pointed out, district officials should have more diligently consulted the Nevada Department of Education on the proposed “transfer.” Under the law, the state superintendent of schools has the power to determine whether the district is adhering to the reorganization regulations. Does this move pass muster?

While it may make sense to transfer some narrow functions back to administrators, the overriding objective should be to ensure the district is in compliance with the language and intent of the reorganization law. In the end, a system that demands accountability will guarantee that principals have more autonomy to run their own campuses, not less.