Useful pursuits.

Byline: Hubble Smith

Feb. 12--Nevada's public education system, consistently ranked among the lowest in the nation, needs to pay more attention to "the forgotten half," students who intend to enter the work force instead of going on to college, a UNLV professor said in a report for the Nevada Policy Research Institute.

Robert Schmidt, adjunct economics professor at University of Nevada, Las Vegas, said the local labor market demands workers with "good practical and technical skills," yet only 6,000 of Clark County School District's 288,000 students pursued vocational education last year.

Las Vegas has the lowest demand for college professionals of any labor market in America, Schmidt said.

"Because K-12 education is almost entirely government-based rather than market-based, it naturally and habitually ignores the kind of marketplace signals that private-sector businesses actively adapt themselves to serve," Schmidt wrote in his report. "By convention, we call this education system 'public,' but it actually operates on statist principles that disregard the choices that the…