We we’re sure what would happen with the Nevada State Education Association’s initiative to raise the gambling tax to 9.75 percent after Senior Judge Miriam Shearing took her red pen to it last month. The teachers had lost a key part of the initiative — the part that specified money raised by the new tax would go mostly to teacher salaries and merit pay.

Would the teachers union move forward with the petition as re-written by Shearing? Would they write a new one? What would casinos do?

We got our answers Tuesday: The teachers union filed a re-written petition that looks curiously like the first one, and contains some interesting language.

First, the title. The old initiative was called "Save Our Schools with Additional Funding." The new initiative is called "Save Our Schools with Additional Funding for Salaries and Student Achievement."

If you’re asking yourself whether the teachers union really put the concepts of "teacher pay" and "student achievement" asunder, you’re very perceptive. Hasn’t the union argued for a long time that paying teachers more necessarily and inevitably leads to student achievement? That they are inextricably intertwined? Yes, they have. And if you like the title, you’ll love the wording of Section 9. Check it:

The money received by a school district or charter school from the State Superintendent Support Fund pursuant to this section must be used to pay the salaries of employees, other than administrative employees, of the school district or charter school, and to improve the achievement of students. …"

So, wait, paying teachers more in and of itself doesn’t improve student achievement? If not, why not? And since providing the finest possible education for kids should be the goal of our public schools, why isn’t "student achievement" listed first, either in the title, or in Section 9?

We’re not trying to be negative here: We’ve long advocated big raises for teachers ($20,000 each per year to start is a good, round number). But we do that because we think paying teachers what they’re worth is a vital step to helping students do better. And we’re surprised to see the union implicitly saying that may not be the case. If this is the initiative that makes it to the voters, you’ll surely hear these arguments again.

Single subject and editing

Last time around, the initiative got in trouble thanks to the state’s infamous single subject law, which says initiatives can only address one thing each. And in the last initiative, there were at least four discrete things included, by our count:

• An increase in the gambling tax, from the current 6.75 percent to 9.75 percent.
  
• A requirement to spend the additional money entirely on education.
  
• A detailed list of how the additional money should be spent (40 percent to add days to the school year and reduce overcrowding; 40 percent on salaries and 20 percent on merit pay and reimbursements).
  
• A clause mandating the Legislature establish a minimum funding floor for education, aimed at preventing lawmakers from reducing their usual funding for schools when money from the new tax came rolling in.
  

Shearing, for her part, said it was perfectly OK to have an initiative raising the gambling tax, and it was perfectly OK to say the money had to be spent on education, and it was even OK to establish a floor for funding (since the goal of getting more money for schools would be moot if the Legislature supplanted those funds). But specifying precisely how the money would be spent was going too far. That, Shearing said, was "logrolling," or trying to get a less-popular policy (spending breakdown) passed by attaching it to a more popular policy (gambling tax to fund schools).

So the teachers had a choice: Pressing on with the initiative as edited by Shearing (assuming it was approved) would have pumped more money into education, but would not have guaranteed teachers would be paid more. The money could be used by the school system in whatever way administrators decided. That was a chance the NSEA was apparently unwilling to take. So the union re-wrote the initiative with the following provisions:

• Increase the top tier of the gambling tax, from 6.75 percent to 9.75 percent. (It’s referred to in the initiative as a "license fee.")
  
• Spend the money raised "…to pay the salaries of employees, other than administrative employees, of the school district or charter school, and to improve the achievement of students."
  
• Two sentences aimed at preventing supplanting, in Section 11. "The proceeds of the license fee provided by subsection 5 supplement, and do not replace, any money appropriated by the Legislature pursuant to subsection 2, 3 or 4. In determining the amount of money of any such appropriation, the Legislature shall not consider the actual or estimated proceeds of the license fee."

So, overall, the initiative is much tighter, and much less subject to scrutiny. You’ll no doubt notice that the minimum funding floor language is gone, even though Shearing said it would be fine. That may be an indication that the NSEA worried the state Supreme Court would have reversed Shearing on that point, and ruled that tax + funding floor = a single subject violation. That’s probably a wise move. And, of course, the specific formula of how to spend the money is gone, replaced with the more vague salaries "…and to improve the achievement of students."

What does that mean? What is the division of the proceeds, between salaries and achievement? All good questions, and all sure to be litigated once the Nevada Resort Association files the inevitable lawsuit. The goal of the casino industry here is to run the clock as long as possible, so that the teachers union doesn’t start circulating the petition until it’s too late to get the required signatures. Sure, the union could start passing the revised version around. But if a court changes even a single word, those signatures don’t count, and it has to start all over again.

Stay tuned to this one. It’s most definitely not over.