Study time

Education funding might be one of the best-researched policy topics in the nation. Nevada lawmakers should know this – over the years, they’ve commissioned enough analysis on the subject to break a bookshelf.

Perhaps the dust on all those reports has rendered them unreadable.

On Friday, an interim legislative panel decided to spend an additional $125,000 to hire a different firm to recommend a new public school funding formula.

After all, a dead horse can’t feel all those extra kicks, right?

The Committee to Study a New Method for Funding Public Schools selected the Washington, D.C.-based American Institutes for Research to complete the report. The firm, which will be paid with donated funds raised by the Clark County School District, has four months to make its recommendations.

So what, exactly, are lawmakers hoping to learn from yet another study? If history is any indication, they won’t see a call for performance-based funding. In some of its previous work for other states, the American Institutes for Research has advocated huge increases in education spending.

Just six years ago, the Denver-based consulting firm of Augenblick, Palaich and Associates conducted an education funding study for Nevada for $225,000. It concluded that Nevada eventually would need to spend an additional $1.3 billion per year on public schools to meet the state’s weak proficiency standards under No Child Left Behind – standards the state has since asked to opt out of. That report was such a political non-starter that it immediately became a joke book.

So here we go again.