Foreshadowing a dreary legislative session, Dems hype modest education plan as ‘major’ • Nevada Current
Nevada state Senate Democrats emailed out a missive Wednesday morning proclaiming that their leader, Nicole Cannizzaro, has announced a “major education policy bill.”
The bill doesn’t exist yet. But there is an outline.
It says charter school teachers should maybe be licensed.
Better late than later, s’pose.
The outline of the bill also has some preliminary language about making private schools that get public money meet some of the same assessment requirements as public schools.
Perhaps one might be excused for thinking a “major” public education bill sponsored by Democrats would stop giving public money to private schools altogether.
Republican Gov. Joe Lombardo, meanwhile, can be expected to “fight fight fight,” as his Dear Leader might say, to make the public fork over even more of its money for private schools, most of which are churchy, and which the vast majority of Nevada children do not attend and never will.
It’s also easy to imagine Lombardo condemning expanded private school assessment standards and stiffer licensing requirements for charter school teachers as “burdensome government regulations” (a phrase Republicans love to sling around) that interfere with holy sacred school “choice” amen.
Extracting another beloved cliché from the Republican grab bag, Lombardo could also complain that license requirements for charter school teachers would amount to “government overreach” into the private entities that manage the overwhelming majority of Nevada’s charter schools.
Then again, that might be a bridge too far for both Lombardo and the management firms. The charter arm of the school privatization movement prefers not to remind people that public funding provided for charter schools goes to private companies.
The Cannizzaro bill that doesn’t exist yet also calls for continuing to fund raises that were funded in 2023. Because nothing says “major education policy bill” like continuing to do what you already did. Very innovative.
And perhaps the most ambitious – or ambitious sounding – part of the legislative outline calls for expanding Nevada’s scantly existing state-funded pre-K programs to create universal pre-K for all four-year-olds.
Many states have beaten Nevada to the punch on universal pre-K. The track record so far indicates the programs are nowhere near as encompassing as the word “universal” suggests. And in an echo of a problem that bedevils K-12 schools in Nevada and the nation, universal publicly funded pre-K programs in other states can’t find enough people to work in them.
In other words, creating accessible and adequately staffed pre-K is not easy.
But it is costly.
Fortunately, Las Vegas resort corporations are spending billions to build resorts in the United Arab Emirates. And only one of those corporations alone, MGM Resorts International, spent $8.2 billion on stock buybacks from 2019 through 2023 – more than twice as much as the entire Nevada gambling industry paid in gaming taxes over the same period.
Such developments obviously suggest that Cannizzaro and her fellow Nevada State Senate Democrats are preparing a high-profile and aggressive public outreach campaign to win support for funding universal pre-K by explaining that now, clearly, is an excellent time to raise Nevada’s lowest-in-the-nation gaming tax.
Ha ha just kidding. If there is one long-held and unshakeable policy position among Nevada Democratic legislative leadership, it is that now, clearly, is no time to raise the gaming tax, and it never is.
The “major education policy bill” announced by Cannizzaro isn’t major.
But it is messaging – something warm and fuzzy enough to win applause from corners of the Democratic Party’s constituency while innocuous enough not to unsettle the resort or real-estate/development industries or other powerful special interests.
The forthcoming legislation Nevada Senate Democrats announced Wednesday will allow them to chant they’re “for” education a lot and say Lombardo is “not for” education if, when, and after he vetoes it. (Reminder – when state legislators meet in their regular session between February and June, it will be the last regular session before the 2026 election in which Lombardo will be seeking reelection.)
Yes, of course this Democratic legislation will be first and foremost a political instrument that gives Democrats the appearance of having a substantive agenda item while also laying the groundwork for future political ad fodder.
And yes any expansion of pre-K will be Lilliputian, treading water on salaries would happen whether this bill existed or not, and while some of the procedural shuffling and administrative juggling and systemic rejiggering that will be called for in the bill might be marginally productive, it’s still shuffling, juggling, and rejiggering.
Could it all lead to some reforms so modest and mild that even Lombardo might sign them? Sure.
But unless the legislation gets strengthened substantially while being drafted (which would be pretty much the opposite of the Nevada Way), it will not be a “major education policy bill.” Cannizzaro, her colleagues, and their political/organizational allies may have to pretend it is. Thankfully the rest of us don’t.
The plan announced by Cannizzaro this week may prove emblematic of the 2025 legislative session. Given Democratic control (but not supermajority control) of the Legislature and Republican control of the governor’s office, and with the election for governor and other statewide offices around the corner, the session promises to be full of sound and fury signifying a whole lot of not very much.
One potential exception is the process by which legislators of both parties, and the governor too, willingly and eagerly bestow billions of dollars of public subsidies on corporate film industry giants who neither need nor warrant public subsidies. That, at least, should be quite the shameless spectacle to behold.
A few passages in this column originally appeared in the Daily Current newsletter, which is free, and which you can subscribe to here.
