It’s that time in the election cycle when political candidates start laying out “plans,” consisting of bullet points, rhetoric and vagueness meant to placate their base's hunger for red meat and still keep swing voters calm. If you don’t know how you’re going to pay for your proposals, or if you haven’t drafted some actual statutory language, you can’t actually call it a “plan.” At best, they’re “musings.”

But that doesn’t mean these “plans” aren’t useful to the voter. They actually tell us a lot, not so much about how real law or policy will change two years after X politician is elected, but rather about how they think about various issues, what their priorities are and how partisan, honest and serious they will be in office if elected.

There is probably no single more important policy debate in Nevada right now than education, and each candidate has released a “plan.” Believe it or not, there is actually quite a bit to like from each of the three viable candidates, and more detail from two of them than one would ever expect. But there is an awful lot not to like, too, and plenty of pie-in-the-sky dreams with details – and costs – deliberately left out of the literal equation.

Enter Jason Frierson, likely to continue being the speaker of the Assembly next year, who recently spelled out his own education agenda. In doing so, he gave a lot of guidance to whoever our next governor is – if he or she is smart enough to listen.

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The biggest partisan controversy over education involves school choice. Republicans love it, Democrats hate it, and now the battle lines are neatly – and self-destructively – drawn.

But Frierson was not reflexively anti-school choice, as the more radical members of his party often are. He kept the door open to proponents, correctly noting that “advocates for vouchers are going to be the true decision makers about whether or not there’s a conversation.” And he reminded those same advocates that they could have achieved funding for Education Savings Accounts if they had been willing to compromise with a Democratic Legislature.

Even his personal reasoning again ESA funding, while flawed, is at least rational and grounded in the spirit of pragmatic prioritization. And he was frank that there would not likely be the votes to fund them under any circumstance this time.

The problem with his argument about “keeping money where it’s needed” is that a significant part of our education challenges lie in the lack of physical classroom space because government bureaucracy and political payoffs to union bosses make building traditional public schools substantially slower and more expensive. Per-pupil spending that gets kids into good schools that the government didn’t have to pay to build is not only a benefit to those children, but also to the ones who remain in public schools who now maybe don’t have to have class in a converted broom closet. But even in this respect, Frierson still indicated a willingness to at least have a conversation, as is the case with any true problem solver.

Contrast this to his party’s gubernatorial candidates, both of whom want to eliminate the private-public education partnership represented by ESAs altogether. But they also want to reduce classroom size, and how they’re going to manage that – especially in the short terms – when it takes three years to build a single elementary school and four to build a high school is beyond me. (Somehow, my kids’ charter school is being built in about seven months.)

Adam Laxalt supports ESAs, but in his “plan” he focuses far more on fast-tracking charter school applications, which is, I think, a smart approach, particularly in anticipation of a Democratic Legislature. You have to give Frierson and Laxalt both credit here for spending the bulk of their energy focusing on the achievable, and on what will solve immediate problems, in a way that the knee-jerk partisan stubbornness evinced by both the Sisolak and Guinchigliani campaigns never will.

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The other part of Frierson’s approach I admire is the understanding that more money alone, without accompanying structural changes, is unlikely to represent real change. For example, while acknowledging that state lawmakers have “not always done right” by public education, he was unafraid to point out that the Clark County School district had been mismanaged and, shall we just say, inaccurate in some of the budget numbers reported to the state. He promised to “make sure they’re being responsible with their resources.” 

This is such a commonsense position, especially in light of the budgetary embarrassments both of our states’ largest school districts have suffered from in the past several years. And yet in her entire plan, Guinchigliani could not identify a single area where funds already dedicated to public schools could be used more wisely, unless you count substantially reducing our ridiculously over-burdensome testing requirements (a position with which I heartily concur). Sisolak is the vaguest, and he doesn’t even have a “plan” published on his website. Even Laxalt could only propose making details of school budgets available online, and had no ideas to share with respect to where the inefficiencies were in education spending.

Both Democrats want to raise taxes for schools yet again, while Frierson would prefer to “give up some pork” in order to dedicate existing resources to higher priorities. This, too, ought not be controversial, and it’s a shame that it will be seen that way in the campaigns. Here in Washoe, for example, elementary schools were going to cost “only” $23 million dollars until tax revenue started exceeding expectations, and now their cost is $34 million. No candidate who doesn’t recognize the need for substantial oversight and monitoring of how tax dollars are spent in our schools can be trusted to achieve quality educational outcomes. He was also willing to correct his fellow Democrats when they erroneously claim education isn’t being funded as promised via marijuana taxes.

Frierson was also clearly thinking in terms of budgets which actually exist, while all three candidates for governor were writing Christmas lists. Guinchigliani, for example, brags in her “plan” that she has “sixteen years of legislative experience" and so she understands the funding formulas for these things better than her opponents do. Yet when pressed about how she was going to pay for her ideas if elected, she demurred, risibly claiming it would be “irresponsible of me to put a dollar figure on this.” 

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I have respected and admired Jason Frierson since we first met and worked together nearly a decade ago. While I disagree with him on a great deal, the pragmatic and open-minded manner in which he approaches Nevada’s hardest problems continues to justify that admiration. Whoever our next governor is, he or she will do themselves no small favor by following Jason’s thoughtful approach to making policy.

Disclosure: Steve Sisolak and Chris Giunchigliani have donated to The Nevada Independent. You can see a full list of donors here.

Orrin Johnson has been writing and commenting on Nevada and national politics since 2007. He started with an independent blog, First Principles, and was a regular columnist for the Reno Gazette-Journal from 2015-2016. By day, he is a deputy district attorney for Carson City. His opinions here are his own. Follow him on Twitter @orrinjohnson, or contact him at [email protected].