Educational reform remains a topic of intense interest in Nevada and throughout the nation. Each state has its own school accountability system, which is enacted into law through legislative action. A common element of school accountability systems is to chart academic performance and progress with a concerted effort towards improving student performance over time.

Here in Nevada, each year in March, public schools in all 17 school districts are required by state law to produce an accountability report and make it available to the community. State law prescribes how the report is to be compiled, and what it should reflect in terms of the achievement and or deficiency level of students and how they performed within the annual review cycle. As a footnote, school accountability in Nevada is directly linked to the federal No Child Left Behind Act, which monitors student test results and performance on a national basis.

Some argue that you can't have true school accountability without holding teachers directly accountable. Others go so far as to say that without holding parents and everyone else accountable, public education is doomed to failure.

Whether appropriate or not, clearly there is an inordinate focus in society on public education to graduate students at an expected level of preparation. At the same time when public schools are undergoing intense pressure to improve, everyone seems to think that private schools are doing a vastly superior job of educating students, without concrete evidence to support that belief. Private schools are exempt from the rigorous testing requirements of public schools, and are not subject to outside scrutiny like public schools are.

I find it intriguing that most private schools in Clark County are run by retired public school educators and administrators who were selected on the basis of their outstanding credentials and a proven track record of success in public education. If public schools are failing, what does their selection to lead private schools say about them and about public schools? I intend to examine the phenomenon of retired public school educators populating the staffs of local private schools in future columns.

As the fastest-growing school district in the nation, coupled with an internal transience rate where two-thirds of the district's students move to a different school from one school year to the next, it is easy to see that there are no clear or easy solutions.

Clearly, the eyes of the nation are squarely focused on public education as a critical component to keep America strong and help the nation remain a world leader in business, commerce and industry. Educators and the entire Clark County School District are working diligently to raise the bar on student achievement.


Watch Ray weekly on the K–12 television newsmagazine show, "Inside Education," which airs Tuesdays at 7:30 p.m. and Sundays at 6:00 p.m. on KLVX-TV Channel 10.