Public Comment: Nevada Board of Education and Commission on School Funding

NSEA hopes today’s discussion is grounded in the origins of this item – the development of Zoom and Victory Schools. For the purposes of at-risk funding, Victory Schools.

Victory Schools necessarily were located in Nevada’s lowest-income communities. They received school-based investment to counter the impact poverty had students, schools, and by extension, communities.

By all accounts, Victory was a model program. I believe this success was largely due to the fact investment was about more than any individual student. It was about community, and the investment helped galvanize transformations in school climate and culture. Victory schools could become centers for the broader community and make connections between students, their families, educators, and the broader community.

Now contrast that with what infinite campus presents today – a hyper-individualized, machine learned, proprietary algorithm, that may or may not meet the everyday realities faced in Nevada classrooms. Many of the issues raised this past year by our colleagues at Educate Nevada Now are worth considering, and we would caution against an over-reliance on this hyper-individualized data, proprietary algorithms and machine learning, arbitrary cut scores, and Nevada moves back toward a community-centered approach.