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Nevada plans to create a competitive grant for its school-improvement fund and differentiate tiers of improvement.
In addition, Nevada’s ultimate consequence for continually failing schools is to place them into the Nevada Achievement School District – an appropriately aggressive step that provides a strong backstop against continued low performance.
Nevada is maximizing its 7 percent set-aside for school improvement efforts through a competitive process.
The process will prioritize strong evidence-based strategies, particularly in the state’s priority areas of turning around the lowest-performing schools, developing strong leadership teams, and analyzing data for decision-making.
Nevada could align more of its resources to strengthen its plan.
Nevada could do more to align its support and improvement strategies in schools identified for targeted support and improvement to raise the achievement of the particular low-performing subgroup of students that led to the school’s identification. Moreover, Nevada could strengthen its plan by further aligning its periodic resource reviews for districts serving a significant number or percentage of identified schools with schools’ needs analyses and improvement plans. It would also be helpful for the state to clarify the responsibilities at various levels — state, district, school, charter authorizer.
