Wednesday, February 3, 2010

Carin' about education?

No one covers the Clark County School District better than Karen Gray, and no one who's concerned with what goes on in Southern Nevada education should miss Karen's latest piece.

An excerpt:
Nationally and locally, public education has become a culture where the existing incentives often reward poor performance and outright failure. It seems that the worse a school or district performs, the more federal grant money it qualifies for, even without improvement. Just scoring poorly or having certain subgroups of student population will earn you extra money.

The culture rewarding underachievement is evident even within public education's own professional associations. Although the Clark County School District has one of the lowest graduation rates in the country, did not make AYP, and ranks at the bottom in just about every survey, poll or study performed, Superintendent Rulffes is one of four finalists in the running for the honor of "Superintendent of the Year" from the American Association of School Administrators.
Read the whole thing here.

1 comments:

Anonymous said...

I am surprised there are no comments on this topic until now. Have Nevadan's given up on sounding their voice? Are they lying down and accepting less than mediocrity for their children’s education? Assuming the information in this article is correct, we should collectively, as a community, be outraged that Mr. Rulffes would be anywhere near a contender for "Superintendent of the Year". I guess before I make that comment I should investigate the criterion used to qualify a candidate for this award. If it means effectively leading an entire school district to a level of failure in virtually every measurable area then I understand why he is on this list. The American Association of School Administrators has some explaining to do. Come on people…let's get involved!