By Ben Velderman
EAGnews.org
    
LAS VEGAS – Clark County Education Association leaders are playing a hot hand these days.
 
Earlier this year, the Las Vegas-area teachers union won a high-stakes arbitration case that forced the financially challenged Clark County school district to hand out pay raises to educators.
 
Now, the CCEA wants to raise the stakes by getting into the pockets of Nevada’s beleaguered business community.   
 
The Las Vegas Review-Journal reports that during a recent union meeting, CCEA President Ruben Murillo unveiled an “education initiative” that would impose a 2 percent tax on state businesses that earn more than $1 million annually. Murillo said the tax plan would generate $800 million more for the Silver State’s K-12 system. The initiative needs 72,000 signatures in order to be presented to the 2013 Nevada Legislature, the Review-Journal reports.
 
“If the legislature doesn’t step up to the plate and do what they’re supposed to do, then education in Nevada is doomed to be a failure,” Murillo warned.
 
Republican state Sen. Barbara Cegavske believes the union’s tax plan would be devastating for the state’s already struggling economy.
 
“We are a state that has the worst economy, and we’re in a recession like we’ve never seen,” Cegavske told the Review-Journal. “To put another tax on businesses that are already struggling and going out of business because they can’t handle what they have is just a slap in the community’s face from the teachers union.”
 
Cegavske also took issue with Murillo’s claim that more money is the key to improving the state’s so-so school system. 
 
“I’m bewildered at why they think the only way to improve education is giving more money,” Cegavske told the Review-Journal. “ … We’ve doubled the amount of money we’ve given (to education) in the last 10 years. The money has increased … and how has it affected our scores and graduation rate?”
 
The senator suggested that a better way of improving education would be to lengthen the school day, and make it easier to fire incompetent or ineffective teachers. 
 
But accountability, oversight and innovation are like kryptonite to the state’s teacher unions. They’d much rather just whine about a lack of money.
 
If the CCEA proposal eventually winds up in the state legislature, lawmakers must demand to know exactly how much money the unions need in order to ensure that Nevada’s test scores and graduation rates come in line with the national averages.
 
Murillo and his union cohorts can’t answer that question, of course, because money isn’t the determining factor in a school’s success.  The reality is that no amount of money can ever guarantee academic success, just like no amount will ever be enough to satisfy the unions.