EDITORIAL: Another education problem money hasn’t solved

Students who struggle speaking English are having a hard time learning other subjects.

The Clark County School District recently released an efficiency study. It contained a number of recommendations to save money and improve student achievement. Among the recommendations was centralizing software management to avoid duplication and see what programs district employees are actually using. It found the district could reduce future maintenance costs by doing more preventative maintenance.

One of the findings on the district’s bus program exemplifies government inefficiency. More than 900 of the district’s buses — more than half the fleet — are wheelchair accessible. That far exceeds “the current demand of 372 students requiring wheelchair access,” a presentation on the report noted. “Wheelchair-accessible buses are more expensive and have less capacity than a general education bus.”

The district believes implementing suggested operational improvements could save almost $80 million annually by July 2031. For context, next year, the district’s general fund budget will be $3.8 billion. Finding efficiencies on the margins is important, but it’s even more important to examine big picture items.

The study also found that English Language Learner students aren’t learning much English. The English proficiency rate for these students was under 15 percent for the 2024-25 school year. For non-ELL students, it was more than 50 percent. That’s still not great, but the difference is dramatic.

In math, the proficiency rate among ELL students was 13 percent. Among non-ELL students, it was almost 38 percent.

“Results show that more than one-half (54.7 percent) of ELL students experienced limited to no language proficiency growth over the past 10 years,” according to a presentation on the report. How is this acceptable?

This is what systemic failure looks like. The education establishment’s reflexive answer to poor performance is to spend more. But Nevada already does. So does the federal government. Washington allocates nearly $800 million annually to programs designed to help students who don’t speak English. And in 2019, the Nevada Legislature revamped education funding, in part to help English language learners.

That reform ensures school districts receive a certain amount for every student — base funding. If a student falls in certain designated categories, the district receives extra funding. This is called weighted funding. The weighted funding for an English learner is 45 percent of base funding. That’s almost four times as much as districts receive for gifted and talented students.

So districts have 45 percent more to spend on ELL students, but their proficiency is around one-third of non-ELL students. The district should adjust course. One obvious step would be to stop advancing ELL students who can’t do grade-level work.

The Legislature should examine the efficiency of this arrangement. Dumping money into a broken system hasn’t fixed anything, but it sure did make things more expensive.