Toward the end of a mid-January meet-and-greet with the six men vying for Clark County schools superintendent, Jim and Heather Murren walked in. The power couple's entrance (he is president of MGM Mirage, she of the Nevada Cancer Institute) was fairly routine—casual intros, firm handshakes, warm smiles; not a hint of pomp. The Murrens were just in time.
Up next was New York education guru Eric Nadelstern, a campion of small schools and campus autonomy handpicked by the nonprofit Council for a Better Nevada (Heather Murren's a member), whose entry into the superintendent search was as cordial as a thumb to the eye. Comprised of 19 top-tier business executives—bigwigs like MGM Mirage Chairman Terry Lanni, Southern Wine and Spirits Senior Managing Director Larry Ruvo and Thomas & Mack Co. Managing Partner Peter Thomas; people who move headlines and bottom lines—the council embarked on a pro-Nadelstern crusade. Cast in the role of obstructionists were school board trustees, administrators and anyone else opposed to Nadelstern's coronation.
The fight was on.
Warring camps dueled in front of legislative committees, at education meetings and in the media.
The council's position: Public education is broken, we want to help fix it.
Edwin Wagner of Mesquite sums the opposition's position in a Las Vegas Sun letter to the editor: "Just because the Clark County School Board is deliberate and divided on an issue, and not in lock step with the Council for a Better Nevada, makes it neither dysfunctional nor ineffective. We have elected or selected school board members to hire a superintendent. I resent the level of interference by the council in the school board's business."
Not that Nadelstern endeared himself to his potential bosses. He might've kept it too real in the January forum: "The schools I visited [Foothill High, Sawyer Middle School and Fitzgerald Elementary] ... I would be happy to teach there and be principal there. But I'm honestly not prepared to send my kids there ... I'm not convinced that principal selection in the Clark County School District is being made on the basis of choosing the best possible administrators."
The council sent five board trustees to New York to see Nadelstern's handiwork; that failed to convince the holdouts. So Nadelstern dropped out of the race and district veteran Walt Rulffes got the job. Four months may have passed since then, but Maureen Peckman says the wounds are still fresh.
"It's taken some time to get over this," says Peckman, the council's executive director and lone mouthpiece. "The school board wasn't ready for the type of change that was going to happen. They [the five trustees] went to New York and saw miracles happening, but were not willing to implement the drastic change of course needed in the school district."
We're sitting in the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf on Flamingo and Rainbow—amazingly, the high-powered council doesn't have an office. Passion bleeds from Peckman's voice. She hated losing on Nadelstern, hated forfeiting the chance to radically reform a school district she says is pimpled with problems. Look at any barometer—academic achievement, attendance, graduation rates, she says, "and you can see we're failing students, particularly minority students."
Which is why the council's first big defeat stings so much. Failure sucks. Especially for people accustomed to winning.
To the extent that the council roared onto the scene, and to the extent that it's viewed as a crew of business know-it-alls who've come to save the school district from exploding—if it doesn't implode first—Peckman doesn't so much apologize as she explains: "When the council was formed, the idea was to look at emerging issues like public education, health care, water resources, children's welfare, etc., and to unite people whose businesses and families have reaped so much and wanted to give back. The business community wanted a seat at the table and deserved a seat at the table. We saw education as a primary issue of importance."
She pauses, pensive.
"Education is the civil-rights issue of our generation."
The phrase leaps from her lips like a crouching tiger. You can hear her fervor. The council didn't step into the education debate lightly, so don't expect it to tiptoe out. And don't expect her to bite her tongue when little Johnny can't read at grade level, when No Child Left Behind is kicking the crap out of schools, particularly poor campuses. The council gives her rope to convey its positions through her feelings. Why not give principals the same rope?
They're chief executive officers of their schools, she says. Why shouldn't they have greater control over their budgets, more leeway in determining where money and resources go and more say in the structure of teacher development and student tracking? Shifting power away from schools is like selecting a CEO, then prohibiting him from setting business hours, hiring his own staff and setting company policy.
"You don't have principals, you have baby sitters," she says.
How can you effectively teach, address racial achievement gaps, mainstream disabled and English-as-a-second-language students when campuses have swelled to 3,000 in high schools, 1,300 in some middle schools, 900 in some elementary schools? Something is wrong, Peckman says, when scores of Millennium Scholarship recipients (students with 3.0 grade-point averages) are in remedial university classes. How can you improve education with attitudes like this: "I had a university head tell me that if a teacher has to go to East Las Vegas to teach Hispanic children or African-American children from a household with one parent or no parents, then that teacher is wasting his or her time because those kids are not going to learn. That broke my heart. You should be able to teach a child in spite of socioeconomics. One trustee told me that we're doing the best we can. To me, that's surrendering. I'm not saying that every kid is meant to go to college, but the school district will be run this way until we change it. We're suffering from a bigotry of no expectations."
Because so much ink has been spilled on the council's beef with the school district, Peckman says its purpose has gotten twisted. The group is equally passionate about defeating Republican Assemblyman Bob Beers' government-constricting Tax and Spend Control initiative, closing gaps in health care and tightening a state ballot initiative process that Peckman says "allows someone with $1 million in the bank from New York to change the Nevada constitution ... the marijuana legalization ballot is being funded from someone out of state who doesn't even care about Nevada."
That's all well and good. Still, TASC, health care and the ballot initiative process are issues for future legislative sessions. Which brings the council back to it can have immediate an impact on: education.
"We're not the first group of business leaders to get involved in education and children's welfare. The Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce and the Clark County Public Education Foundation have been involved for years. The difference is, we have industry leaders associated with us whose names alone generate notoriety and interest," Peckman says.
"The easy story is to bash CBN because of its members. This is not just about writing a check. We wanted leaders in their respective industries, people with histories of involvement in social and civic issues. Heather Murren is a member. In four years, she raised $50 million to build a state-of-the-art cancer research institute. People used to say that McCarran Airport was our best hospital, and now 20 percent of the customers at the institute come from out of state. The media wants to find ways to criticize us but it's very natural [for school trustees] to be defensive when we say we can do better. It's very natural that an antagonistic relationship results. Walt [Rulffes] and I have a tremendous relationship, though we disagree on some things."
Mary Jo Parise is sure the council means well. The vice president of the nonprofit Nevadans for Quality Education just wishes it had more tact. And less vitriol. And, she says, more facts. Where is the data to match rhetoric about autonomy's power to resurrect campuses? Had its members looked into the matter locally, she says, they would've seen examples in place at schools like Bendorf Elementary, where principals, administrators and teachers have leeway to tailor curricula and reallocate resources to meet students needs. Had they done their homework, she says, they would see the carving up of the 292,000-student district into five regions (soon to be six) is a form of decentralization.
"They came in with preconceived notions that there is a magic pill ... anyone who thinks school autonomy is going to change things doesn't have a grasp of the issues," Parise says. "There are huge concerns about school autonomy. It resembles site-based management, which the district had years ago, where teachers were talking about what colors they would paint on the wall and not what books to buy. Some schools chose to give up phonics and go with whole language instruction, and that's why we have so many children that can't read or spell. Parents, teachers and principals made all the decisions for the school. Those schools were happy places, but there was no learning going on. The council only represents a small portion of the business community. I really think they need to learn the issues. I've been involved in local education for more than 20 years, and I'm still learning. We travel across the state and country and do research."
Bill Hanlon's 30-plus years in education include local, state and regional posts. As director of the Southern Nevada Regional Professional Development Program, which trains administrators in Clark, Nye, Esmeralda and Lincoln county school districts, he knows Nevada's problematic education system better than most. He doubts the council has any real solutions.
"CBN is an outside distraction," he says.
Hanlon claims he was booted from the council for asking too many questions. He's also got a running conflict with Dr. William Ouchi, a UCLA professor, author and school-management expert hired by the council. Hanlon says Ouchi's research is flawed.
"He [Dr. Ouchi] talked about Houston schools. They have gone from having seven exemplary schools in 2004 to four in 2005 and 25 schools went from acceptable to unacceptable categories. This information comes from the Texas Department of Education," Hanlon says. "Dr. Ouchi was talking about how good Seattle schools [using autonomy] are the best-performing schools in Washington. But I looked it up. They aren't."
Hanlon's point: The council is sold on an idea that's not a panacea. Some schools in Washington state are scrapping autonomy because of so-so results on the state achievement test students must pass to graduate.
Autonomy has empowered principals, teachers and parents to make decisions on budgets, curricula and resources, Seattle Public Schools Communication Director Peter Daniels says, but it's also further taxed the 46,000-student district's resources.
"There might be curriculum differences when students transfer from schools. How do you make decisions on the issue of what's in the best interest of each school?" Daniels asks. "Autonomy can work. It's very taxing on a large system if you don't have the fiscal and human resources to put into every single site, and we're struggling with that."
If Seattle is struggling, how would the Clark County School District, with five times as many students, fair?
Ouchi says he's willing to debate anyone, anywhere, anytime—Hanlon in particular—on the benefits of autonomy. His research on autonomous schools covers 1998 to 2002, he says, so it wouldn't include the data Hanlon is talking about.
"I don't believe anyone, including Mr. Hanlon, has done a comprehensive study on campus organization and the resulting student performance on large school districts," Ouchi says. "I have."
From 1998 to 2002, Ouchi analyzed 223 schools from six large districts with decentralized schools in the United States and Canada, compariing them with centralized campuses in the largest U.S. districts—New York, Chicago and Los Angeles.
He found that: students in decentralized Houston schools outperformed their counterparts in centralized LA's schools in every grade level in math and English; the achievement gap between whites and Asian-Americans, and blacks and Hispanics, shrank in Houston and increased in LA.
Ouchi, who says his study was the first such comparison, says autonomy is catching on in cities like Miami, Oakland and Boston. He helped write Hawaii's law on school autonomy. California recently passed a law allowing autonomy in 15 districts. Even the Clark County School District is onboard: four decentralized campuses open this fall.
But Ouchi's well-respected two cents was one thing. Creating the Community Alliance for the Reform of Education (CARE) to monitor into every other aspect of school district functions quite another, council detractors say. Parise, of Nevadans for Quality Education, thinks CARE will be a more hands-on (read: nosier and mettlesome) version of the council.
CARE's 35 members are drawn from a larger pool of business leaders. Peckman says the council is but one voice among the 35, no more influential than the rest. On CARE's radar are the normal gripes—student achievement, per-pupil funding, dropout rates. CARE member and frequent school district critic, Louis Overstreet, who serves as executive director of the Urban Chamber of Commerce, says the group and the council have different missions. CARE is neither a rubber stamp, missionary or mercenary for the council.
"CARE has a diverse educational agenda; the council was mostly interested in the superintendent search," he says.
Given the pedigree of the council's members, CARE recruit Dean Dupalo says the school district should welcome its input. An adjunct political science professor at UNLV with a litany of gripes against the district, Dupalo plans to run for the school board. "The members of the CBN want strong graduates with excellent skills, both traditional and advanced to compete locally, nationally and internationally—hopefully no different from the goals of the school district power structure."
"Ideas are great ... we all got them," says John Jasonek, president of the Clark County Education Association. The group represents 17,000 local teachers. If the council, CARE or any business leader wants to make a difference in education, he says they can start by convincing their industries to pay more taxes. Nevada has experienced an economic boom but you wouldn't know it by looking at per-pupil spending. "This state should be embarrassed. These people [on the council] didn't get influence without having power and the dollars that come with it. The more influence you have, the more responsibility you have."
Back at the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf, Peckman is still on fire. The council is here to stay. Nearly 80 percent of the members attend the monthly meetings—no mean feat considering their convoluted schedules running some of the biggest companies in the state and the nation. Though it's her job to articulate the council's views, that doesn't mean everyone is always on the same page. These are powerful people, remember, used to dictating, not being dictated to. But Peckman's no pixie. Calls from council members come at all times of the night, generally wanting more information about this topic or that. After the Nadelstern defeat, she was the one who needed a pep talk.
"My head was in my shoes for a long time about it. This has aged me a lot, but I also find this really exhilarating," Peckman says, laughing. "I've had a lot of sleepless nights. I'm responsible for their reputations and the council's results."
Ah, results.
Let's see. Right now it's School District, 1, Council, 12. The Nadelstern issue was a short-term disappointment, yes, but it did raise awareness among business leaders and nonprofits and prompted the creation of CARE. Executives who would've never sat down and talked about improving education are doing just that. That's a victory, she says.
She's mildly convincing. And there are those four Superintendent Schools: Rose Warren, Kirk Adams, Lee Antonello and Paul Culley elementaries. The campuses will be freed from stringent oversight, principals will be given latitude to decide which teaching methods work and where to spend money and given the ability to select staff, modify curriculum, offer performance incentives and institute longer school days and lengthier school years.
Peckman offers a wait-and-see look.
A question on whether the council would stump for education issues in Carson City brings a preamble about the group being nonpartisan and apolitical. Would it proffer a candidate for the school board, presumably in line with its reformist goals? It would lend support, she says. What about the ever-present issue of businesses paying more taxes to help education? Don't members of the council have the power to effect this?
"People are always talking about per-pupil funding," she says. The passion is back.
"New York spends $13,000 per student and students there are still struggling. Republicans say you mismanage money and Democrats say you don't give up enough. They're both right. Would people pay more in taxes to help education? Yes. But the money must be managed better."
Call it the debate that won't die: Is the school district bloated? Trustee Mary Beth Scow reminded the Weekly recently that legislative audits prove the district is responsible with taxpayer money. "Their own counsel bureau did an audit of the district and their own research proves this. It's a lot easier to write that in a newspaper and get headlines than to get the facts."
Peckman hopes the relationship between the council and school administrators can be worked out for the sake of all students.
"No one in the school district is evil," she says. "We realize we are part of a three-legged stool, along with the community and lawmakers. The school district is not a fiefdom. We have to have all three entities together or we will fall."