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NPRI’s litigation center sues CCSD to obtain public records

LAS VEGAS — Today, the Nevada Policy Research Institute’s Center for Justice and Constitutional Litigation filed a lawsuit under the Nevada Public Records Act against the Clark County School District.

NPRI is seeking a list of government-issued email addresses for CCSD teachers. Joseph Becker, chief legal officer and director of CJCL, will represent NPRI in the lawsuit.

NPRI first requested these public records in June 2012 and again in February 2013. Both times CCSD refused to release the records, claiming, in part, that government-provided email addresses for government employees were part of employees’ personnel records and need to be “safeguarded.”

“The Clark County School District has a long history of delaying and denying public-records requests for information that district bureaucrats don’t want to release,” said Andy Matthews, NPRI’s president. “It’s hard to imagine a record that is more public than a government employee’s government-provided email address, but the stubborn refusal by CCSD officials to follow Nevada’s Public Records Act has left us no choice but to sue to compel obedience to the law.

“Nevada court rulings have made it clear that even email content from government officials’ mailboxes are subject to Nevada’s Public Records Act, so it’s ridiculous for CCSD bureaucrats to pretend that government-provided email addresses for government employees are confidential.”

Matthews noted that the Nevada Supreme Court recently authoritatively re-affirmed that, under the NPRA, access to public records “must be construed liberally” and that restrictions on access “must be construed narrowly.”

“At a time when CCSD is crying poverty to legislators in Carson City, it’s unfortunate that CCSD bureaucrats have decided to waste taxpayer money fighting the release of public information to the public,” Matthews said.

Matthews added that numerous other reporters and media organizations have reported to NPRI employees that CCSD is one of Nevada’s least-transparent government agencies when asked to fulfill public-records requests.

“The principle in this lawsuit is about more than just one specific request,” Matthews said. “The court should send a clear message to CCSD that delaying and denying public-records requests — whether from NPRI, media organizations or private citizens — is illegal and must stop.

“Government exists to serve the public, and it’s time for CCSD to act like it serves the public and not the other way around.”

While Matthews noted that the reasons behind a public-records request are irrelevant in terms of government agencies’ legal obligation to fulfill the request, he willingly shared why NPRI seeks the government-issued email addresses.

“Last year, NPRI reached out to a number of CCSD teachers, informing them of their right to opt out of the Clark County Education Association, and their opportunity, under the contract between CCEA and CCSD, to do so by submitting written notice to the union in the two-week window between July 1 and 15.

“Even though the list we used last summer was woefully incomplete,” said Matthews, “when the CCSD teachers learned of their options, more than 800 exited CCEA.

“This year, we want every teacher to know that he or she has the ability to leave CCEA and save almost $800 a year in dues, while getting better health and legal insurance through alternative organizations.”

Also named as defendants in the lawsuit are the Nevada Education Foundation and the Public Education Foundation. The foundations are named as defendants because, in response to NPRI’s initial request, CCSD stated the Nevada Education Foundation owns the license to the records NPRI seeks but also implied that the Public Education Foundation owns the license.

The complaint names all three organizations as defendants, said Matthews, so CCSD cannot continue its shell game and pretend some other organization owns or controls the records.

Requested in the lawsuit are the records, that the court enjoin CCSD from delaying and denying future legitimate public-records requests, and costs and attorney fees.

The Center for Justice and Constitutional Litigation is a public-interest law organization that litigates when necessary to protect the fundamental rights of individuals as set forth in the state and federal constitutions.

Learn more about the Center for Justice and Constitutional Litigation and this case at http://npri.org/litigation/.

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Las Vegas Metro salary data for 2012 now available at TransparentNevada

LAS VEGAS — Salary data for the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, for the calendar year 2012, is now available at TransparentNevada.com, a Nevada Policy Research Institute website that makes government-spending data easily accessible to taxpayers, NPRI announced today.

“The employees of Las Vegas Metro continue to be some of the highest compensated employees — public or private — in the Las Vegas Valley,” said Andy Matthews, president of NPRI. “In 2012, 149 employees took home more than $200,000 in total compensation, with one captain raking in over $585,000 in total earnings.

“One lieutenant cashed in for over $354,000 and an assistant sheriff received more than $294,000.”

Matthews stated that, in 2012, 348 employees received over $175,000 in total compensation, and 888 employees took home over $150,000.

“These inflated salaries are the result of collective bargaining laws that favor politically powerful labor unions over the needs of taxpayers,” he said. “As we’ve seen before and are seeing again, right now, once it becomes apparent that such salaries are unsustainable, government unions start demanding that Nevada’s struggling families and businesses fork over even more.”

Matthews noted that the release of the salary data comes as Las Vegas Metro brass wants the Nevada Legislature to authorize a quarter-cent increase in the sales tax and give the department “flexibility” in spending that money. Originally in 2004, tax increase proponents had pledged that the sales tax increase would only be used to hire new officers.

“Las Vegas Metro’s budget problem flows directly out of its inflated salaries,” said NPRI’s president. “Just last year, it paid three police sergeants a combined $1.09 million, while spending over $140,000 each on 1,343 employees.

“Just as you wouldn’t give more alcohol to a drunk, you shouldn’t give more money to a government agency with a spending problem enabled by a bad collective-bargaining law. To really fix what’s wrong with Metro’s budget, reform or eliminate NRS 288 — the 44-year-old law that is the root of the problem.”

Matthews observed that in 2005, Metro police officers received a new union contract from the county that included a 21.8 percent, across-the-board pay hike over four years.

He also noted that Metro annually spends over $1.8 million paying police officers and other employees to work for private organizations — unions — instead of protecting taxpayers.

“Union leave time is an outrageous and unconstitutional use of tax dollars,” said Matthews. “While Metro brass threatens the public — saying citizens will be even less safe without a tax increase — they pay certain officers over $1.8 million to sit on their behinds and work full-time for taxpayer-gouging private associations.

“Here is an alternative solution for lawmakers: Make taxpayer-subsidized union leave time illegal. Not only would this save taxpayers money, it would also put more officers on the streets.”

The release of the salary data comes during Sunshine Week, March 10-16, a nationwide effort to highlight the importance of governmental transparency.

“It’s appropriate that this information is made available to the public during Sunshine Week, which highlights the need for transparency in government,” said Matthews. “Even a casual glance at the Metro salary data now available at TransparentNevada shows that excessive salaries are behind Metro’s budget difficulties.”

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NPRI: Assembly Republicans’ plan would reform education while defending taxpayers

CARSON CITY — In response to an Assembly Republican press conference on education policy, NPRI’s Deputy Policy Director Geoffrey Lawrence released the following comments:

The education-reform agenda announced by the Assembly Republicans is quite encouraging in many respects. Like Governor Sandoval, Assembly Republicans have grasped that, in public education, we frequently don’t get what we pay for, and that some programs are vastly more cost-effective than others.

They also grasp that Nevada taxpayers — who, of course, must also provide for their own, private household needs — necessarily have only limited resources. Which means it is incumbent upon policymakers to choose the most cost-effective solutions available and forego those that are less effective.

Lawrence noted that the most efficient way to improve student achievement without further burdening taxpayers is to improve accountability by allowing parents to choose where and how their child will be educated. “With choice comes consumer discipline,” he said, “which allows the forces of the marketplace to weed out ineffective educators while the most talented educators are rewarded.”

He continued:

It’s particularly encouraging to see that Assembly Republicans, along with Governor Sandoval, call for a tax-credit scholarship program. States as diverse as Arizona, Florida, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island now boast these programs that provide financing to primarily low-income children. Tax-credit scholarships allow these children to escape failing neighborhood schools and instead attend private schools of their choice. For these children, this opens up untold possibilities that would otherwise never be available.

Because choice programs like tax-credit scholarships are most beneficial to families with limited incomes, they have been supported by policymakers from all points on the political spectrum. It’s also why important commentators on the political Left have characterized school choice as “a civil rights issue.”

Lawrence noted that longitudinal studies have repeatedly shown that full-day kindergarten — like other early-education programs — fails to produce lasting gains in student achievement. Speaking directly of these programs, he said:

While these ideas might sound great in theory, decades of evidence have demonstrated that they do not accomplish what their proponents promise. The point of all education spending should be to improve a child’s achievement over a lifetime, and these programs’ results fade almost immediately.

Although not highlighted by Assembly Republicans, class-size reduction is also an expensive program that has failed to produce results. Nevada taxpayers have now poured more than $2.2 billion into this program and, yet, the state’s own data has shown that students in larger classes have outperformed their peers in smaller classes.

What is the greatest variable impacting student achievement that schools can control? By a huge margin — research has shown — it’s the quality of the teacher. That’s why it’s essential for Nevada to establish meaningful teacher evaluations built on sound, longitudinal tracking of student performance. Once the best teachers have been identified, they should be handsomely rewarded, while those who are ineffective should be assisted to improve their skills with additional training — or encouraged to exit the classroom.

Lawrence further noted that every tax dollar used to bail out Nevada’s struggling Public Employees’ Retirement System or on excessive building costs is a dollar that is unavailable for classroom spending. He concluded:

Assembly Republicans recognize that the budget process is about tradeoffs, and that if they want to spend more on education, they must find savings elsewhere. That’s why it’s so important to end the unnecessary hundreds of millions wasted by Nevada’s prevailing wage requirements, as 10 other states, facing similar challenges, have done since the 1980s. Also, PERS reform is paramount if that system is to remain solvent. Otherwise, taxpayers will continue to be compelled to dump more and more into the system each year to attempt to keep up with its large and growing unfunded liability.

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NPRI: Calls for higher taxes based on faulty premise

LAS VEGAS — In response to an announcement by Senate Republican leadership that they support raising mining taxes as an alternative to the margin tax, NPRI’s Deputy Policy Director Geoffrey Lawrence released the following comments:

Calls for higher Nevada taxes — whether on the mining industry or on everyone else through the job-killing margin tax — regularly rely on a faulty premise: that Nevada needs to pour always more dollars into its monopolistic government schools.

Nevada’s kids deserve the best education in the world, but that won’t come until politicians admit that ever-higher public-school spending doesn’t increase student achievement — as the last 50 years in Nevada have demonstrated.

As measured by the Department of Education, in 1960, Nevada spent $430 a student. In 2009, we spent $8,865 a student. That figure doesn’t even include all of Nevada’s education spending, but it does show that nearly tripling inflation-adjusted per-pupil spending in the last 50 years hasn’t grown student achievement or increased graduation rates.

Lawrence noted that Nevada spends more per-pupil than a majority of its neighboring states, including Arizona, which has similar demographics to Nevada, but Nevada gets worse results. He added:

Nevada’s education system is broken. Because of NRS 288, Nevada’s collective bargaining law, union bosses have more control over state education spending than do legislators or school boards. Poor and middle-class parents, deprived of school choice, don’t have the ability of wealthy families to opt out of the failing government-school monopoly and send their children to better private alternatives.

Spending more on the same broken system will only entrench the status quo — ensuring that tens of thousands of additional students every year will fail to read, learn and graduate.

Commenting directly on the proposals, Lawrence continued:

Tax policy should secure a level playing field for all industries and entrepreneurs. It shouldn't be used to punish one industry for its success or to bias individuals' decisions about production or spending patterns. Regarding mining, the more important discussion should be about how Nevada can take back the 85 percent of its lands currently controlled by the federal government. If these lands became available for private ownership and development, then state and local governments could reap immediate revenues from private auction as well as ongoing property tax revenues while miners could claim ownership over the minerals contained in their property without jumping through complex bureaucratic hoops.

The people of Nevada won't benefit from feeding the power of the state’s political class with additional money from an increased mining tax. But they would benefit even less from a margin tax. Incredibly destructive, the margin tax hastens the closure of businesses that are already struggling, and it crushes high-volume businesses with low profit margins.

In Texas, where the margin-tax rate is just half of the proposed rate in Initiative Petition 1, 20 percent of small businesses laid off employees after the margin tax was enacted. Forty percent of small businesses saw an increase in their state tax liability of over 500 percent. Furthermore, 3 percent of small-business owners in Texas had decided to close their doors as a result of the margin tax and nearly 14 percent had to drop health care or other benefits.

Genuinely solving Nevada’s problems will not involve taking more money from taxpayers, but spending the money government already collects more wisely.

Lawrence concluded that NPRI’s Solutions 2013 publication contains solutions in 39 policy areas that allow government to achieve better results for less money. "It doesn't make sense to raise taxes when we know there are so many areas of ineffective spending," he said.

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NPRI testimony: Pre-K and full-day kindergarten programs produce only small and temporary gains

LAS VEGAS – Today, Victor Joecks, NPRI’s communications director, offered the following testimony on SB 182 and AB 163 to the Senate Committee on Education and Assembly Committee on Education.

My name is Victor Joecks, and I'm the communications director at the Nevada Policy Research Institute. Thank you for this chance to share how pre-K and full-day kindergarten programs are not a path to permanently increasing student achievement.

Numerous studies have shown that learning gains from full-day kindergarten programs are both minimal and temporary — having faded by the end of the third grade.

One of the studies used to promote full-day K today is by Walston and West done in 2004. In 2005, Walston, West and Rathbun conducted a follow-up study on the long-term effects of full-day kindergarten. Here's what they found:

“The reading score growth per month is .04 points lower (effect size =.10) for children who attended full-day kindergarten compared to those who attended half-day kindergarten after taking into account the other factors in the model. No difference was detected for the growth of mathematics scores. These findings suggest that children who attended public school full-day kindergarten classes did not maintain their advantage over the three years after kindergarten” (Emphasis added.)

A study on the longitudinal effects of full-day kindergarten by the RAND Corporation found that “there are initial benefits for students and the mothers of students that attend full-day kindergarten, but that these differences largely evaporate by third grade. Contrary to claims by some advocates, attending full-day kindergarten is found to have no additional benefit for students in families with income below the poverty threshold.”

A meta-analysis, published in the Review of Education Research, found that “full-day (or all-day) kindergarten had a positive association with academic achievement (compared to half-day kindergarten) equal to about one quarter standard deviation at the end of the kindergarten year. But the association disappeared by third grade.” The analysis also found, “children may not have as positive an attitude toward school in full-day versus half-day kindergarten and may experience more behavior problems.”

A study published in the Economics of Education Review found that “full-day kindergarten has sizeable impacts on academic achievement, but the estimated gains are short-lived, particularly for minority children.”

Finally, I’d like to share the results of a study released by the Clark County School District of full-day kindergarten in 2007. CCSD’s study found that “at-risk” second graders who attended full-day K showed improvement over children in half-day, but for the second graders who were not “at-risk,” those who attended full-day K performed three percentage points lower than students who attended half-day kindergarten.

Let's now examine pre-K programs, like Head Start. The federal government has to date spent $180 billion on Head Start. In 1985, the Department of Health and Human Services conducted the first meta-analysis of the research about Head Start and concluded:

"In the long run, cognitive and socioemotional test scores of former Head Start students do not remain superior to those of disadvantaged children who did not attend Head Start."

In 2010 and 2012, HHS released the results of a high-quality, random assignment study of Head Start and found, once again, that learning gains were both minimal and temporary. To quote from the executive summary of the 2012 study:

"There were initial positive impacts from having access to Head Start, but by the end of 3rd grade there were very few impacts found for either cohort in any of the four domains of cognitive, social-emotional, health and parenting practices. The few impacts that were found did not show a clear pattern of favorable or unfavorable impacts for children."

Next, let’s examine Oklahoma and Georgia, which both started universal pre-K programs in the 1990s. Oklahoma's scores on the fourth grade NAEP reading test are actually lower than when they started pre-K in 1998. In Georgia, it took 19 years from the start of universal pre-K for its scores on the same text to exceed the national average.

Finally, proponents of pre-K have traditionally cited three studies to justify pre-K, but there are significant problems with all three.

Findings from the Perry Preschool Project have been used to claim that a dollar investment in pre-K yields taxpayers a $7.16 return. However, this study, conducted from 1962 to 1965, suffers from numerous methodological problems, including a sample that was "not completely random," and its requirement that "the children in the preschool program had to have parents home during the day."

The Abecedarian Project was much more than preschool. The program put infants — who were, on average, 4.4 months old — into a 40-hour per-week education center. The pre-K component of the program appeared to have no effect on learning:

Herman H. Spitz, a well-respected academic psychologist specializing in measuring intelligence among those with developmental disability, notes that the project's effect appeared by the time the children were just six months old. …

This means that the actual preschool component appears to have had no effect whatsoever. Since current preschool programs and proposals do not begin within a child's first year, this study actually suggests that preschool programs are ineffectual, and hence should be neither passed nor expanded.

The Chicago program is another that poses problems for pre-K advocates. No random-assignment study, it involved "extensive interventions with parents" and included tutoring for some students through the third grade.

The federal government has spent $180 billion on Head Start and achieved no lasting result. Nevada’s kids need a proven reform, like school choice, instead of proven failures, like pre-K and full-day kindergarten.

Thank you.

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NPRI testimony: CCSD’s numbers don’t add up

LAS VEGAS — Today, Victor Joecks, NPRI’s communications director, submitted the following testimony on education funding levels to the Senate Committee on Finance and the Assembly Committee on Ways and Means.

My name is Victor Joecks and I’m the communications director at the Nevada Policy Research Institute. Thank you for the opportunity to submit testimony on historical levels of education funding over the last few years.

I’d like to make three observations today.

First, much of what you’ve been told today — specifically from the Clark County School District — isn’t true. In the past few years, CCSD has not made over $500 million in budget cuts. How can I say this so confidently? Because that’s what CCSD’s own general fund budget numbers show.

This information comes from a budget worksheet created by CCSD and formerly available on the district’s website. After NPRI published an article detailing this information, however, the worksheet was removed from the district site. Nevertheless, a copy of that publication remains online for your perusal.

Second, if CCSD’s budget hasn’t been cut by $500 million, why is the district facing financial problems? Because CCSD’s labor costs — its largest expenditure — have been rapidly increasing. Between 2007 and 2011, CCSD’s labor costs increased by nearly 20 percent. And that 20 percent increase occurred during the worst economic downturn in decades.

When an organization’s funding remains essentially flat, but its largest expenditure increases by 20 percent, budget challenges are certain. Those challenges, however, result from the massive increases in spending, not from large funding “cuts.” What these out-of-control spending increases reveal is Nevada’s serious need for collective bargaining reforms that will eliminate evergreen clauses and binding arbitration.

Paradoxically, while local revenue has declined, state funding through the Distributive School Account has increased to its highest level ever.

Third, according to Superintendent Dwight Jones, CCSD currently has 17,568 teachers, and the district reports 311,238 students. That’s one teacher for every 17.7 students. Given that simple math, responsible lawmakers should examine why CCSD is claiming that its average class size is 34 students for elementary schools and 38 students for high schools.

These class sizes are dramatically larger than the class sizes reported on NevadaReportCard.com for the 2011-12 school year. NevadaReportCard.com shows the average high school class size is between 24 and 27 students, while the average student-to-teacher ratio in the first grade is 19-to-1. The high for all grades was the fifth grade, at 28-to-1.

Furthermore, according to NevadaReportCard.com, CCSD had additional teachers this year 17,568 — as compared to 17,147 last year.

In short, CCSD’s numbers don’t add up.

In order to fix Nevada’s education system, you must be able to accurately identify what the facts are. CCSD officials have given you their spin, but Nevada’s students need you to cut through the district’s misinformation and identify the truth.

Thank you.

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Media Mentions

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Nevada Policy article on business regulations in the state of Nevada

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Quote from Outreach and Coalition Director, Marcos Lopez.

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