EDITORIAL: Even teacher unions respond to incentives

With the right set of incentives in place, even education union officials can push for reforms that improve student achievement.

Clark County School District students have just completed their first week of classes. Things may have seemed a bit different at Western and Desert Pines high schools and the 16 schools that feed into them. That’s because the district and the Clark County Education Association have launched a pilot program at these campuses, which serve around 17,000 students.

Students at certain elementary schools will be in class for an additional 19 minutes. Doctoral students at UNLV will tutor struggling kids. In addition, after completing their sophomore year, students at Western will decide whether to pursue college or a trade.

The high schools will also offer pre-K programs. High school students who want to become teachers will help run them. Elementary schools will also offer pre-K. This part of the initiative is unlikely to be effective because studies show time after time that pre-K produces only temporary learning gains. Further, it can increase future behavioral problems, as a study of Tennessee’s pre-K program found.

But if other elements of this new approach work, this project could improve academic performance year-by-year. That would set students up to do well in high school and beyond.

“We’ve never loaded up the type of support that we’re doing in these schools … the way we are with this feeder alignment,” said John Vellardita, the union’s executive director.

There certainly is a need to try something new. Tom Williams is a one-star elementary school included in this initiative. In the 2015-16 school year, it had 988 students. In the 2025-26 school year, it had 488 — a 50 percent decline. Hewetson is another one-star elementary school. Over the same time period, its enrollment went from 939 to 558.

Many of these schools have been failure factories for years — if not decades. It’s worth looking at why the district — and especially the union — is trying a new approach. Last year, Gov. Joe Lombardo and the Legislature passed a broad education package, Senate Bill 460. Mr. Vellardita said it could cause failing public schools to become charter or private schools. Those schools generally aren’t unionized.

Are the pieces falling together? For decades, the district and union used their failures as proof Nevada needed to increase education funding. Nevada’s collective bargaining law gives union officials outsized influence in determining how that money is spent. That means new money largely went to paying the same people more to do the same thing.

That didn’t improve student achievement, but it did help to repeatedly boost education funding.

Now that accountability is on the horizon, the union is eager, desperate even, to help students make academic gains. If Nevada policymakers are paying attention, there’s a lesson here.