EDITORIAL: Lake Wobegon at the Clark County School District

Members of the entrenched education establishment are careful to pay lip service to “accountability” while doing everything they can to undermine it. Consider the evaluation systems for principals and teachers in place at the Clark County School District.

According to district records, the Review-Journal’s Amelia Pak-Harvey reported last month, just one out of more than 300 principals was rated “developing,” the second-lowest designation, over the past four years. Not a single principal received the lowest rating of “ineffective.”

Meanwhile, the most recent data available reveal that 97 percent of Nevada’s teachers earned an “effective” or higher rating on the performance scale.

The disconnect is obvious for those who choose to see it: These glowing reviews for educators come amid a backdrop of widespread underachievement in the classroom. Tests reveal that only 28 percent of the state’s eighth-graders score high enough on standardized tests to be considered proficient in both math and reading.

Officials with the Clark County Education Associated, which represents classroom teachers, told Ms. Pak-Harvey that they keep track of problem principals. Great. But their commitment to monitoring poor administrators seems more strategic than principled, given the union for years has fought efforts to include student performance in teacher evaluations.

Notably, a day after Ms. Pak-Harvey’s story on the grade-inflated principal report cards appeared, district officials removed the principals from Sedway, Brinley and West Prep middle schools after they failed to improve the school’s one-star status. All three principals had been on the job for “multiple years,” Ms. Pak-Harvey noted.

As is typical, however, none of the principals was released or even demoted. Instead, all three were quietly shuffled off to other schools so the district didn’t have to undertake the complicated and likely futile effort of initiating termination or demotion proceedings under union contracts.

In the insulated world of public education, you see, the default response is simply to throw up your hands and decry as “subjective” and “unfair” and “too complicated” any attempt to hold teachers and administrators answerable for their performance. Never mind that such analysis goes on every day in every private-sector workplace.

And so the charade continues. Just like in Lake Wobegon, all the Clark County teachers and principals are “above average,” nobody can ever be sent packing and the underperformers bounce from campus to campus with most parents none the wiser.

As for the kids? Well, that’s a whole other story.