It’s a farce. A perfect, door-slamming, missed communications, egotistical characters farce.
And they’re overseeing our children’s education.
Door #1: The.. er, union boss. Evil. Vindictive. Twirls the hairs on his sad little mustache with a burr in the nail of his pinky finger. He loves stereotypes. And can’t stand anyone who doesn’t conform.
Door #2: The hapless politicians who purport to be working for the people of Nevada, who accepted almost a million dollars in campaign finance money from the organizations run by the ...union boss, and then, mysteriously, ran bills in 2023 that seemed like they were written by the ...union boss’ team.
Door #3: The Committee to Leverage Obedience With Nonsense. Or CLOWNS. They purport to be trustees overseeing the education of the children in Clark County.
Door #4: The heads of the school district, who have ushered out scores of leaders - including the ones who worked most closely with them - who had more than a few centuries’ worth of collective knowledge on how good education works; and replaced them with the education equivalent of TV dinners. And who kept the remaining leaders obedient through vicious retribution.
Door #5: The state of Nevada, which prides itself on being one of the most unprofessional states in the country. We pay the hapless state legislators for 60 days of work, then make them work 180 days every two years. But we don’t make them work in between, so their constituents don’t have representation after the legislative session is over. And we pay the people who oversee the school district $9,000 a year. Which is why they are called CLOWNS.
I mean, ya get what you pay for, right?
The latest scene in our ongoing farce comes after a year-plus campaign by the ...union boss to oust the head of the school district, whom he had saved from being ousted just a couple of years before.
Oh, what a plot twist!
The thing is, the ...union boss had his priorities. And his priorities weren’t the people he represented. If his priorities were the people he represented, he would not have let almost all of them lose access to health care while paying the guy who was running the insurance system into the ground 200 grand as he was heading out the door.
He would not have watched as the largest exodus of teachers in the district’s history weakened the already bad quality of education the district had to offer.
He WOULD have stood up for teachers to be treated with dignity, as professionals, who know how to create curriculum and care for their students.
In fact, the ...union boss declared to anyone who would listen that his number one priority was to get rid of one of the CLOWNS - the one who kept calling out the clown show. She didn’t fit into his stereotype. She didn’t play the role he wanted her to play. So she became target number one, his most obsessive priority. And since she was leading the charge to get rid of the head of the district, that meant the ...union boss had to support the head of the district.
Who was treating the union’s teachers so badly, they were leaving.
Within two weeks after that representative lost her seat in the CLOWN car, the ...union boss turned his sights on the head of the district.
My god, these people are so predictable.
A year later, the head of the district says he will walk out of Door #4 and never return, but he wants nearly $500,000 in walking around money, and he wants his deputy - whose idea it was to serve students TV dinners rather than let teachers create curriculum that caters to students - to take his place.
No searching through other doors for other leaders. No wondering if anyone actually wants to work for the CLOWNS. No transparency. No good government.
And now, the ...union boss is pissed!
He didn’t bank on this. He didn’t bank on the head of the district insisting that he wanted to be paid out. He didn’t bank on the second most hated person in the district taking his place. He didn’t bank on no replacement search happening. He didn’t bank on not having someone in place whom he could bully or manipulate.
He is learning the lesson that the best high school English teachers know all too well: be specific.
He just wanted the district leader out. He didn’t have any specific plan for what would happen after.
The best part of this was when one of the hapless legislators - who had been joining other hapless legislators in calling for the head of the district’s resignation - tweeted out on the day the resignation was announced that this was “a great relief,” only to walk that back the next day when the ...union boss told him the door he walked through was booby-trapped.
The hapless political leader did say something, though, that rang true, and that I have not heard many people say: “Meaningful and lasting change at CCSD requires a change in leadership philosophy.”
Yes.
We have no “leadership philosophy.” Except “student outcomes,” which is so vague as to be utterly meaningless.
There is an education revivalist preacher barnstorming the state repeating, ad nauseam: “Student outcomes won’t change until adult behavior changes.”
But he has no specifics on what adult behaviors need to change. He sure does have a lot of idolatrous adherents, though. Including the CLOWNS.
Students don’t get good outcomes without teachers who are given everything they need - including the freedom to teach their students where they are at. Students don’t get good outcomes when there is new building leadership every couple of years, and everyone is walking around scared. Students don’t get good outcomes when they spend most of the year with a substitute because district leadership is driving full-time teachers away.
After kids went back to school post-pandemic, building leaders and teachers were told to teach the curriculum the students would have been learning had they not missed school. With no plan to make up for learning loss. Or to help them sort through the terrifying time they had just lived through.
And kids were violent and acted out. How surprising.
A now-former principal once told me this district has lost sight of the people its supposed to serve.
“Kids are people, the parents are people, the support staff are people, the teachers and the administrators are people,” she said.
The current - outgoing - district leader, and his current deputy (who is slated to take his place) do not see the whole organism. They do not see kids or parents or teachers and certainly not support staff as people. They see them as subjects they can move through different doors.
The ...union boss also does not see the folks he represents as people. He actually tried last week to put down the district leader by calling him a “gym coach.” Thereby insulting all the gym teachers he represents.
The Clark County School District has not for decades had a philosophy of educational leadership. The district just keeps seesawing back and forth between leaders who, during their tenure, want to empower teachers from the ground up, only to have the next leader be dictatorial and controlling.
Unfortunately, almost six years with our current leader and his loyal deputy have “ground up” teachers in a totally different way. And so many of them are gone, that we will need a lot of visionary state leadership to fix it.
Visionary legislators that are not beholden to the ...union boss to keep their jobs.
The way I see it, if you get paid crap, and the only draw to being a legislator is power, why would you give that away to the highest bidder?