Backpacks Full of Cash
I talk to Nevada Succeeds’ Seth Rau about the Silver State’s new Education Savings Account experiment…
EduShyster: Thanks to Nevada’s bold new*universal choice* program, I’ve got exactly $5700 in my backpack. Now I need you to help me choose what choice to choose. Should I go traditional, private, high-performing charter school seat, virtual? What do you think?Seth Rau: In Nevada, the miracle of the high-performing seats that you’re so familiar with in Massachusetts never happened. For the most part our district charter schools are strongly underperforming. There’s also been a heavy reliance on virtual charter schools. More than a quarter of the students who attend charters attend virtual schools, which have been a disaster for many kids. For example, Nevada Virtual Academy was the largest charter school in the state and had a 32.5% graduation rate in 2011-2012.
EduShyster: Before I cross *charter schools* off my choice list, I want to unpack something that you just said. By *strongly underperforming,* you don’t just mean *bad night at the craps table bad,* you mean *students falling behind by six-to-seven months a year bad.*
Rau: These numbers were from a 2012 CREDO report that only looked at data through 2010. The charter sector has improved considerably in the past five years. However, if we start looking at the reasons why the sector is improving, it’s even more worrisome. Our district schools now essentially serve students in poverty, Latino students and African American students. Then you look at charters, and Las Vegas is now the fastest growing charter market in the country. Las Vegas continues to have explosive growth, but all the growth is up in the suburbs of the city, not in the inner city. The suburb of Henderson has opened up11 new schools in the past five years and not a single one was a district school. They were all either charter or private schools. There are pockets of poverty in Henderson but it’s basically a middle class community. The new schools opening there are 10% free and reduced lunch or 15%. So because of all of these new schools opening up in the past five years, the charter sector is getting to be higher performing, but they’re not serving students who are actually in poverty.EduShyster: OK—so sounds like charter schools are out for me because they’re either terrible or they’re in a zip code I can’t access. (Pausing here for a brief irony break…) I think I’ll take my $5700 and go to a private school. I bet there are a whole bunch of choices for me to choose from.
Rau: Nevada is below the national average in students who attend private schools (6% of the population). The people who can afford to send their kids to private school do, it’s just that there aren’t that many people in that category. We have a very large wealth gap between our top earners and the rest of the population. You have a strong concentration of the one percent, because you have a number of large corporations that are based here, then you have 60% of the population that qualifies for free or reduced lunch. So the people who can afford to send their kids to private school do, it’s just that there aren’t that Backpacks Full of Cash | EduShyster:
