Grow Up

This economic downturn has proved that Nevada and its public agencies need to grow up.  The days of overflowing revenues to throw at problems and to extend graft to the lucky few are over.  We must live on a rational budget and must decide how to prioritize our spending.  We must purge graft and waste where it exists and we must raise the funds needed to provide necessary basic services.  Of course we could decide to do nothing and hope for the best, but our history tells us that such a path will probably lead to our major cities becoming ghost towns.  How then do we mature and get rid of the graft and waste?  So far the strategy has been to cut public agencies to the bone under the assumption that austerity will preserve what is necessary, while pushing out excesses.  Unfortunately, that’s not what has happened in many agencies for a simple reason.  In any organization those most likely to engage in graft and waste are at the top and wield the most power.  And it is those at the top who get the money first and make the decisions on operations as well as on who stays and who goes.  At the core, this is why we haven’t winnowed public agencies down to just muscle.  Thus, we’re now on version 2.0 of purging waste and graft.  In education, the new model appears to be performance funding; reward the competent and identify the slackers for removal.  But the only way for this to work is if every individual is judged on what he/she controls.  If an administrator controls what faculty can teach and more importantly how faculty can teach, is it appropriate to judge the faculty for those variable?  Obviously not, faculty must be judge on what they control and administrators must be held accountable for their decisions or nothing will change.