LAS VEGAS, Nev. (FOX5) – Nevada students are continuing to make small improvements in subjects like Math and English Language Arts, according to a new report from the Nevada Department of Education. But Clark County School District students are behind the rest of the state, depending on grade level.
Less than a third of CCSD students in third through eighth grade are proficient in Math at 30.1%, slightly worse than the rest of the state, and 39% were proficient in English Language Arts, also lower than the rest of Nevada.
Longtime teacher and tutor in the Vegas valley, Patricia Gordon has seen this problem before.
“It’s been a struggle because parents whose kids are getting A’s and B’s think their kids are okay and they can’t add and subtract,” Gordon said.
Gordon knows the percentage points don’t vary by much in new numbers released on Monday, but she says those differences can be striking when considering COVID’s lasting effects.
“I naively had thought that after the pandemic, everything would just go back to normal,” Godron said. “The students would come in and they were already years behind.”
Gordon has tutored hundreds of CCSD students at Mathease Tutoring, and has an assessment that shows her exactly what grade level they’re at and which standards are missing.
“So, I would have a fifth-grade student two, three years behind. My opinion, they should have got people caught up, not just dump them where they were.”
For CCSD’s part, 200 schools improved their index scores with 80 increasing their star rating. More than half of CCSD schools improved performance during the 2023–2024 school year.
State Superintendent of Public Instruction, Jhone Ebert is optimistic about the findings.
“How can we take best practices and make sure they’re implemented across every single school in the state of Nevada? That’s what this report card is to do,” Ebert said. “But to your point, do we have a ways to go, yes!”
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