EDITORIAL: More inflated grades at CCSD

There’s something wrong when a struggling school district’s evaluation system concludes that virtually all of its teachers are successful.

Last month, the Clark County School District Board of Trustees received information on teacher performance. For the 2023-24 school year, district officials rated more than 14,000 teachers. More than 2,150 teachers were deemed “highly effective.” Almost 12,000 earned an “effective” rating. Just 56 were considered “developing,” and only 20 were judged “ineffective.” That means only 0.54 percent of teachers, around 1 in 186, received a rating below effective.

On the surface, this would seem to be great news. Teacher quality is the most important school-controlled factor in student achievement. Having an effective teacher means most students will learn at least a grade level’s worth of material. Highly effective teachers can help them learn even more. A school filled with effective teachers will put its students on a path to lifelong success.

A district filled with only effective or highly effective educators would have remarkably high rates of student achievement.

But that doesn’t describe the Clark County School District. According to the Nevada Report Card, fewer than 40 percent of third graders are proficient in English. The number is 41.5 percent in math. The longer students stay in the district, the worse they do. By eighth grade, English proficiency has fallen below 36 percent. In math, it has dropped under 22 percent. In Nevada, graduating high school students take the ACT. For the class of 2024, Nevada had the lowest average composite score in the nation.

How can a district filled with failing students claim that almost all of its teachers are effective?

Because the evaluation is — and always has been — a sham perpetrated on taxpayers. Student achievement represents only a minor factor in the process when it should be the primary focus. Last year, it accounted for just 15 percent of a teacher’s rating. In some previous years, it has been 0 percent. Blame Democrats in the Legislature. In 2019, they reduced the weight of student achievement in teacher evaluations from 40 percent to 15 percent.

The disconnect between Nevada’s bogus teacher evaluation system and the reality in the classroom should be painfully obvious. The current process, designed to protect the status quo, exists as a mechanism for perpetuating mediocrity and incompetence at the expense of students. It’s also a glaring example of how far legislative Democrats will go to protect their teacher union benefactors from even a smidge of accountability, which is the education establishment’s kryptonite.