Ignoring best
practices
The Nevada System of Higher Education is positioning itself
for ever-greater waste
By Steven Miller
BusinessNevada
Is
Nevada’s higher education system making the same
mistake that its chancellor has identified in the Clark County
School District?
News stories recently revealed that a business
group led by Chancellor Jim Rogers had retained a nationally
known management expert to screen candidates for the school
district job.
Working with the business group is Dr. William
G. Ouchi, professor of management at UCLA and an important
critic of centralized government school systems. In 2001-2002,
Ouchi led a massive, landmark study that found that
decentralized school systems were not only more economically
efficient but also better at producing achieving students.
“Researchers discovered,” says the professor’s
website, www.williamouchi.com, “that the schools that
consistently performed best also had the most decentralized
management systems—individual principals, not administrators
in a central office, controlled school budgets and personnel.”
When principals bear full responsibility and
also have greater freedom and flexibility to shape their
educational programs, says Ouchi, research shows that the best
principals start becoming entrepreneurs. Then, if families
also have more freedom—the freedom to choose among competing
public schools—“good schools flourish while those that do
poorly literally go out of business.”
Ouchi—Sanford and Betty Sigoloff Professor in
Corporate Renewal at the Anderson Graduate School of
Management—is out to acquaint public education authorities
with the findings of modern business management research.
Exceptionally relevant to the crisis of contemporary public
schooling, those findings show that when market dynamics begin
penetrating tax-funded education, significant improvements
occur not only in cost-efficiency, but also in the caliber of
the schools and the quality of their students’ educational
achievement.
Given this frame of reference, Rogers’ apparent
embrace of the management professor’s research seems
paradoxical, at the very least. That’s because an increasing
amount of public evidence suggests that the chancellor, in his
own domain of responsibility, is actually intent on moving the
Nevada System of Higher Education in precisely the opposite
direction—away from any attentiveness to market signals
and away from the quality and costs benefits that greater
competition in Nevada’s higher-ed arena would bring to the
larger statewide community.
NSHE already has significant advantages over
other possible entrants into Nevada’s post-secondary education
marketplace. State lawmakers use taxpayers’ funds to pay about
80 percent of per-student costs at the state universities.
This means that Silver State taxpayers already are compelled
to shoulder a much larger share of these costs than do
taxpayers at virtually any other public college in the
country. In addition, those subsidies present a punitively
unequal playing field to any private colleges and universities
that might contemplate serving Nevada’s higher-ed marketplace.
In such a context, Chancellor Rogers’ frequent
and high-profile injection of himself into political issues
takes on added significance. His conspicuous public efforts to
damage the election prospects of the state’s best-known
conservative candidate for governor, Congressman Jim Gibbons,
was one such incident. Another was the chancellor’s recent
attack on any future Tax and Spending Control (TASC)
initiative in Nevada when he distributed, by Fedex mailings,
an assault on Colorado’s Taxpayer Bill of Rights produced by
the leftist Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. CBPP’s
less-than-honest video hit piece runs for 13 minutes but
conspicuously avoids mentioning the central cause of
Colorado’s recent fiscal woes: a massive new unfunded
constitutional mandate for school funding passed in 2000 that
has crowded out funding of other state needs.
In both of these cases—the case of Gibbons and
the case of TASC—it is evident that the NSHE chancellor views
any prospect of greater protection for Nevada taxpayers as an
impermissible impediment to his plans to expand the state’s
higher education monopoly.
In this context it is illuminating to review
the Board of Regents’
June minutes. What they
reveal is that although Rogers is nominally the Board of
Regents’ employee, by aggressive centralization of power and
exploitation of a leadership vacuum, the once-interim
chancellor now appears to have established himself as the de
facto chief policy maker of the Nevada System of Higher
Education. Further, the top policy priority is not to address
the system’s educational quality problems, nor to address
extensive institutional waste—both of which stem ultimately
from NSHE’s centralized socialist structure and immunity from
market discipline. Rather, what most energizes this chancellor
is to launch a massive statewide building program that will
financially obligate Nevada taxpayers for decades to come.
This is a natural enough goal for a government
bureaucrat. However, it will surprise many business people who
thought this chancellor might better understand the utility of
markets.
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Steven Miller is editor of BusinessNevada and
policy director for the Nevada Policy Research Institute.
