EDITORIAL: Another effort to water down teacher evaluations

The Nevada educational establishment is again offering its own parody of Garrison Keillor’s fictional Lake Wobegon, in which “all the children are above average.” In the make-believe world inhabited by many school unions, all the teachers are “effective.”

For a decade, entrenched education interests have fought an effort to overhaul Nevada’s teacher evaluation system so that it includes a student achievement component in addition to classroom observations. A 2011 bill insisted that student outcomes represent 50 percent of assessments. But the proposal met with resistance from the usual suspects and was delayed until 2016 and reduced to 15 percent.

The original reform made sense, given the relationship between teacher quality and student learning. In addition, the status quo was a sham. Consider that 99 percent of Nevada’s 20,785 public school teachers during the 2015-16 school year earned an “effective” or “highly effective” rating. There’s a place other than Lake Wobegon where everyone is exceedingly competent. It’s called Fantasyland.

Nevertheless, the evaluation reform is again under attack in Carson City. Assembly Bill 57, submitted on behalf of the Washoe County School District, would eliminate student achievement from the equation for the next three school years. You can bet that the “temporary” pause will become permanent if Democrats remain in the majority.

This is yet another “progressive” attempt to eliminate accountability from the state’s public education system. In recent years, legislative Democrats — acting on behalf of the teachers unions — have:

■ Starved or ignored Education Savings Accounts and Opportunity Scholarships, which allow parents to choose from additional schooling options for their children, thus subjecting traditional public schools to a modicum of competition.

■ Watered down the Read by Three proposal, which was intended to ensure students can read at grade level by fourth grade.

■ Killed the Achievement School District concept, which would have converted failing Clark County campuses to charter status, thus giving principals more autonomy to experiment with what works.

None of these moves benefited students. Nor will AB57, which will make it more difficult to put a quality teacher in every classroom.

In 2015, legislative Republicans agreed to the largest tax hike in state history to fund schools in return for reforms designed to promote accountability. Democrats have since repealed or muted virtually all of those changes while unions now demand another massive infusion of tax money. Meanwhile, most Nevada students haven’t seen the inside of a classroom in a year.

Perhaps Democrats in Carson City should focus laser sharp on the latter before they again pave the road to mediocrity by ensuring that every teacher is automatically deemed above average.