LETTERS: Headline deceptive on CCSD grad rate
To the editor:
I have some concerns about the headline of Tuesday’s article on reviewjournal.com (“CCSD bolsters graduation rate by correcting tracking errors.”) The headline doesn’t recognize that CCSD increased its 2012-13 graduation rate by 4 percentage points due to academic gains. An additional 900 students graduated in the Class of 2013 than the year before. That’s 900 more kids who can get a better job and pursue higher education because they have a high school diploma.
I want to praise and credit our students for their perseverance and commitment to success. As a community, we must give proper credit to the students, staff and teachers who worked so hard and devoted so many hours to this achievement. Our employees made sure every student had an individualized plan for graduation through proficiency test boot camps, summer school, tutoring and mentoring programs, to name a few.
Yes, some of the 9.9 percentage-point increase in our graduation rate is due to the fact that we are doing a better job of tracking students who leave the district. But I am frankly upset at the insinuation that district staff was correcting a past mistake. Instead, we are working with rules under the new “cohort rate,” the national method of calculating graduation rates.
Our staff should get credit for finding students who had been counted as dropouts in our system, but who had actually successfully transferred to another district or to another diploma granting program. So let’s focus on what is really making a difference, the kind of difference I know we can replicate in the future — the 40 percent of our graduation rate increase that is attributed to increased student achievement.
Our community, students and staff deserve to know that the district is making progress toward hitting the average national graduation rate — with a goal to soon exceed it.
CAROLYN EDWARDS
LAS VEGAS
The writer is a Clark County School Board trustee.
Sad State of the Union
To the editor:
It’s unclear how much of the planned economic change outlined in President Barack Obama’s State of the Union speech is sound economics and how much of it is simply vote-buying.
Take the size of governments, at federal, state and local levels. Government employees mostly do good and needed work. But not much of their output can be exported to other countries. So, to the extent that they consume imports, the trade deficit grows.
Yes, government employees pay taxes. But no one is in a tax bracket greater than 100 percent, so their salary and benefits are a net drain on the treasury.
Yes, the federal deficit is less now than in the depth of the recession, but there is still a deficit, so we must continue to borrow. If interest rates rise, that problem is exacerbated.
So, by executive order, the minimum wage for anyone who does business with the government must be $10.10. Assume a company in Cleveland sells bolts all over the world, and sells a bolt to the government. But the company has a McDonald’s franchise in the plant so his people don’t have to drive to get a Big Mac for lunch. Does this new law apply here? Who knows? (We do know that lawyers will get rich from trying to sort it out.) Nowhere on Earth, ever, has raising the minimum wage increased employment.
We try to entice people to save (MyRA), but force them to put that savings into government bonds. If the history of the dollar is any indication, that saving will buy fewer loaves of bread when people cash it out than when they invested it.
We have about $17 trillion in national debt and about $100 trillion in unfunded future government obligations. Are there any solutions to that? I didn’t hear any.
CHARLES GOULD
LAS VEGAS
