Nevada wants to create an Achievement School District, where low-scoring public schools can be turned into charter schools and managed by private operators. Nevada wants to copy the failed experiment in Tennessee, whose ASD has not met any of its goals other than to privatize public schools.
The person picked to run the Nevada ASD is Jana Wilcox Lavin. A newspaper in Nevada, the Desert Beacon, wrote about her appointment and asked about her credentials to run a school district made up of struggling schools. It checked her background and found that she has a master’s degree in marketing. But she did work for a time at a charter school in Memphis. The Desert Beacon realized that what is really happening is that the state is investing in a “privatization scam.”
The Department of Education would like to find private sector “operators” to take over the management of “struggling” schools. Applicants are asked to contact Jana Wilcox Lavin, whose background is in marketing. Leaving a person to ask what qualifications she might have as the “superintendent” of a school district with a BA from Tulane and an MA in Integrated Marketing Communication from Emerson College. Not that those aren’t fine institutions, but exactly how this prepares a graduate and board member of a college prep boarding school in Connecticut (Hotchkiss) to run a charter system isn’t all that clear. As a prep school product I’m not knocking the prep part, but there’s no Public in Hotchkiss, Tulane, or Emerson. As close as Wilcox-Lavin has come to the Public part of the equation may be a stint as the executive director for a charter school operator in Memphis, TN.
For some reason, the shocking number of charter schools that are struggling will not be added to the Achievement School District. Some, like the Andre Agassi Charter school, may be turned over to another charter operator. But as of now, Nevada has no plans to address the fact that the charter sector is lower-performing than the state’s public schools.
Nevada calls its successful schools “Shining Stars.” Its lowest performing schools are called “Rising Stars.”
Despite the failure of charter schools in the state, officials still believe that the answer to low-scoring schools is to turn them over to charter operators. Isn’t the definition of insanity doing the same thing over and over again and expecting to get different results?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“Nevada calls its successful schools ‘Shining Stars.’ Its lowest performing schools are called ‘Rising Stars.’”
And the bastardization of meaning continues unabatedly in the public education sector.
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“Rising Stars” is double-speak for “lipstick on a pig.”
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good one.
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More accurate, Nova’s, everyone is burned out and it explodes in the end! Nevada just can’t learn from the failure of others, they have to experience it first hand. My 4/5 star school is about to lose half the faculty to retirement this year, only one of the retirees will have 30 years in, the rest are just done with the nonsense. I plan on leaving next year. Clark County also has an interesting reorganization fiasco going on with the state requiring the hiring of a consultant, a former mayor of Las Vegas and an advertising executive for the casinos, for 1.2 million. The district is to foot the cost for her “expertise” while they redefine the superintendent’s role and authority, a likely breach of his contract. The circus is here and the clowns are in charge, but they aren’t funny. Of course, they will build a new football stadium using public dollars even without a team to play there. You can’t make this stuff up.
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I taught in the CCSD for a whopping total of 58 days. What a tragedy – not only for the students but the teachers that they employee. I moved from a successful school district in SoCal after 10 years of teaching in public schools.I moved for the lower cost of living (salary remained the same) as well as I’m not going to lie – the monetary incentive that was promised of $5000.00 for the first two years of teaching. I thought it would be a great way a beginning dent in my high student loans.
I was one of 15 new teacher hires at my school alone and apparently this has happened for the last three years. Most of the teaching staff is new with under three years experience (they are called the veteran teachers) I was teaching at a three star school at the beginning of the year and when the state score for the SBAC returned from the previous year of 6%, the score was dropped to a one star, We were told we were now in line fora charter school take over, our wages could be tied to achievement, we would all loose our jobs and have to reapply to the “new” CCSD employment which I later found out it all depends upon your Principal giving you an excellent rating at the end of your first year for transfers and rehires.
Long story short, CCSD does not value the teachers they hire to teach the children of Las Vegas. I was not allowed to deviate from the lesson plans which were scripted and had to be followed to a T. The logic was if a supervisor was walking out of my classroom the flow of the sentence and lesson should be picked up in the classroom next to mine. My kinders need extra time for letter formation and sounds. I was told we do not teach letter formation, we teach writing which is copying a sentence The children were not allowed to be children – they had only 10 min of recess daily and most days it was taken away from us because my Kinders could not line up quickly and quietly. (These children do not have the luxury of preschool so they came to school sorely lacking in basic skills – no or low abc and color recognition, how to hold a pencil and scissors, how to sit – and BOY ARE THEY REQUIRED TO SIT ALL DAY!, sharing and manners to name a few.)
The monetary incentive was played around with and finally was agreed that new hires would be allowed to receive this but only after taking classes for points 1 – 2 for 3 hours of class 30 total for the year and most of them costing money (?) the catch here is that if you were a go getter as I am and started to line up classes, only to find out that only your Principal could approve the classes you were to take according to a 10 page new teacher assessment/observation that was not given until the middle of October.
CCSD and the state of Nevada have a new law that states each child must be proficient and reading on grade level by 3rd grade yet we had no reading curriculum that put books in the hands of my students. I was to teach them verbally (sitting on the carpet for hours at a time) by reading books that were 3 academic years above them – the same book for a week, and a another phonics verbal lesson after lunch.
Yes – hallways were supposed to be totally quiet (level 0, bubbles and bumpers – mouths quiet with cheeks full and arms behind backs.) as was lunch with the assistant Principal and Principal yelling into microphones for the children to be at “Zero voices”. Staff and teachers yelling in the hallways, classrooms, lunch rooms and in my opinion all due to behaviors that could have been prevented by allowing for more outside time as this is also learning time. Ten mins with 130 kinders all trying to climb on a small play structure – they’re not allowed to run away or on the surrounding blacktop – is not enough.
On the positive – they had art, music and PE teachers hired so the children do get to experience this additionally during their day. However these teachers have a load of 800 + students on the rosters and receive no support from the general teachers.
I could go on and my heart is heavy for the children of CCSD. Their education is being played with while CCSD tries yet another way to teach being brought inside by folks who have never been in a classroom. Although the folks running the school/zone where I was did not inspire me in any way choosing instead to criticize my teaching, my classroom required bulletin board as well as the hallway bulletin board and my choice of footwear and holding daily am meetings that could have been emails that ALWAYS ran over the allowed 20 min and made me late to open my classroom and took away my time to prepare for my classroom in the morning.
There’s no place like home – I’m back in SoCal teaching and would rather live paycheck to paycheck then make this kind of mistake again.
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Wilcox worked for Scholar Academies as CFO I think her title was- I only met her when she would walk around potential donors and show off only the best classrooms. I worked for the flagship school at Scholars, a bit of an anomaly since we were well funded and could counsel out kids who didn’t fit the mold. One of the recent charters managed turnarounds they opened only lasted two years and the other 5 maybe?
Scholars Kenderton was a turnaround the school they left out to dry. Most of the details were left out of the news, but a few blogs covered it closely.
http://thenotebook.org/articles/2016/06/23/kenderton-surrenders-charter-returns-to-district-control
http://www.newsworks.org/index.php/local/education/93427-parents-livid-about-charter-company-pulliung-out-of-north-philly-school-unexpectedly
She has two failed turnarounds under her belt that they district or other charters had to reabsorb.
http://thenotebook.org/articles/2015/05/19/src-to-vote-on-turning-over-young-scholars-douglass-to-mastery
How does someone who with this track record get a promotion?
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