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Quick Hits

Los Lunas School Superintendent Arsenio Romero is New Mexico’s new Secretary of Education. Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham announced Romero’s appointment Tuesday.

Romero, who will assume his new position March 6, is a veteran New Mexico educator and superintendent. He has served as superintendent in Deming as well as Los Lunas, and also as assistant superintendent for the Roswell Independent School District.

During his tenure in Deming, the district transformed from the lowest-performing school district in the state to a model for instructional practices and career technical education pathways. 

Romero also serves as New Mexico State University regent. In 2019 he was awarded the National Superintendent of the Year by the Association of Latino Administrators and Superintendents. 

“Arsenio Romero is a proven education leader. He knows what it takes to focus on New Mexico students, make hard decisions and improve academic achievement,” said Amanda Aragon, Executive Director of NewMexicoKidsCAN. “We look forward to him bringing a student-centered vision and much needed stability to the PED for the remainder of the governor’s term.”

Lujan Grisham has found it challenging to keep the education secretary filled. Romero will be her fourth education secretary. The most recent, Kurt Steinhaus, resigned last month. Several other senior department administrators have left in recent months as well.

Romero’s appointment comes at a critical moment for public education in the state. New Mexico students continue to rank last in every educational measure, and student achievement is at its lowest point in decades.

Los Lunas School Superintendent Arsenio Romero is

Commentary

Editor’s note: This article was written by Hope Morales, executive director of Teach Plus New Mexico

We don’t know what we don’t know. 

Three years ago, I was elected to the Roswell school board and currently serve as board president. Because of my training and experience—I have been in education for more than 15 years as an educator and advocate—I bring expertise on student learning, understanding data, the need for quality teacher training, and alignment between the three. 

Yet, as a newly elected board member, I didn’t know what I didn’t know. Elected school board members have very specific required duties. One of these is approving budgets. The only budget I felt I had expertise in was my family’s.

Outside of that, I came to my position as board member with no consistent training or experience with financial documents, balance transfers, budgets by departments or schools, and all the in-between line items. Although our district has an excellent finance and leadership team, I want to feel confident in my training and understanding as part of my board responsibilities.

Hope Morales

Board members across the state come from a variety of backgrounds and experiences, which is essential for serving our communities. However, sometimes there are gaps in our knowledge base, which can trickle to gaps in vision, discussion, and votes. 

School boards meet at least on a monthly basis to approve annual budgets and monthly bills, adopt policies, review student and program effectiveness, learn about trends in student learning, and evaluate the leadership of the superintendent. I haven’t met a board member yet, myself included, who can do all of these things on day one or even in that first year, without support.

You will often hear advocates in Santa Fe argue the need for local control, which allows for flexibility on decisions made by community leaders, based on the various strengths and needs of their community. But what happens when a board or board member doesn’t know what they don’t know? 

A system that has governed our local school boards since I first attended their meetings in the audience more than ten years ago continues. Unlike state leaders who have access to full-time staff, experts, and policy analysts, school board members often depend on local resources and their own knowledge. 

I’m lucky that, in my role as Executive Director of Teach Plus New Mexico, I work with many excellent, dedicated teachers who believe that if  we can better train and support local school boards, schools, staff, and students will thrive. 

As part of our work at Teach Plus, the teachers in our programs interviewed 10 current school board members from across New Mexico. While opinions varied on the effectiveness of the training they received, most school board members we spoke with believe that visiting schools would help them in their role, especially related to issues on which they’re likely to vote. 

This is just one of Teach Plus teachers’ recommendations. The others, which I fully support, include developing a baseline of training for board members including understanding school funding, building quality local budgets, and an overview of legislative updates; bringing in experts to lead training sessions such as members of the Legislative Finance Committee (LFC) and Legislative Education Study Committee (LESC) and increasing the number of required training hours from five to 10 annually; and requiring all school board members to conduct an annual walkthrough of a school.

We need to have clear expectations and systems for accountability and support, so that no matter who serves on a school board, the New Mexico School Board Association, or the Public Education Department, the system will be set up to support all local elected school board members.  

We need a system that includes better training and support for school board members so that no matter who is in charge at the state or local level, board members will be ready to serve our students and communities. 

We need to have clear expectations and

News

Experts studying Albuquerque Public Schools as part of the district’s strategic planning process observed a pervasive lack of rigor across the 189 classrooms they observed.

That was one of the more sobering findings released to the Board of Education this week in Attuned Education Partners’ “Organization Diagnostic” of APS.

After observing lessons in classrooms across APS, researchers found that students were “provided with opportunities to respond authentically to grade-level tasks in only 38% of observations.” 

While the classroom observations were more a “snapshot” than a comprehensive review, board members and senior staff said the findings were troubling.

The report also found that 40 percent of students were “chronically absent” in 2022, and that elementary schools had a 49 percent absenteeism rate.

Board member Danielle Gonzales described the findings as “a gut-punch,” which shows that “we are failing our kids, and that’s a tragedy.”

“My heart breaks for the kids in this district,” Gonzales said.

And board member Peggy Muller-Aragón said it’s hard to expect students to perform at grade level if they aren’t given work that allows them to demonstrate their proficiency. “We need to give our kids a chance (to show) what they can do. And many of them are not even given that opportunity,” she said.

But board member Barbara Petersen said the diagnostic report failed to address “root causes” of students’ struggles which, she said, often originate and are exacerbated by factors outside of school control.

“My caution is there is no analysis of root causes,” Petersen said. “So all of this ends up being done with very much a deficit perspective, (suggesting) that there’s something wrong with our teachers, there’s something wrong with our students.”

It would be helpful, Petersen said, to examine root causes. High absenteeism, for example, can in part be explained by the fact that low-income children get sick more often and have less access to health care, or must stay home to care for a sick sibling or grandparent.  

As part of its work, Attuned Education Partners observed classrooms across the district, interviewed students, educators, families, union leaders, and others, and analyzed district performance data.

One finding from interviews was that low expectations suggested by below grade-level work was frustrating to students, who said they felt ready to do more rigorous work than teachers were giving them.

“When we asked them about ways to improve their classroom experience, more often than not, they raised that they would like to kind of have a more rigorous experience in terms of how they are pushed,” said Dina Hasiotis, Attuned’s chief strategy officer.

Earlier this year, the APS board developed four academic goals for the district to achieve over the next five years. Superintendent Scott Elder and his staff now must take those goals, and  the results of the diagnostic assessment, and craft a five-year strategic plan for the board to approve and monitor.

Other “key gaps” identified by the report included:

  • Inequities in student outcomes across and within district zones as well as demographic groups. Most glaring was the fact that white students in grades 3-8 scored three times higher than students of color on state math assessments, and twice as high on English Language Arts tests.
  • A wide array of “stakeholders” expressed frustration at district leadership’s lack of vision on where the district is headed. They also complained about “a sense of limited accountability, from the top down, extending to students.”
  • Inequities in student experience of curriculum and instruction, “and a need for more consistency and alignment.”
  • Poor communication from the central office to schools.

On a more positive note, Attuned found that APS prides itself on its cultural diversity, and seems committed to “supporting the unique cultures of its community.” People interviewed also said they appreciate the wide array of extracurricular activities the district provides, and the variety of resources APS provides, particularly to students in need.

But those positive glimmers were overshadowed by the consultants’ other findings, a point that wasn’t lost on board members.

“I really hope we use this as the wake-up call that it is,” Gonzalez said.

Experts studying Albuquerque Public Schools as part

Quick Hits

A bill that would extend learning time in New Mexico public schools by up to 15 percent per year has sailed through two legislative committees, outpacing two other bills pushing a similar agenda.

House Bill 130, authored by the Legislative Education Study Committee (LESC), has passed both the House Education and Judiciary committees and is currently awaiting a vote on the floor of the House of Representatives. It would increase the amount of time students must spend in class to at minimum 1,140 hours per year.

Under current law, students in first through sixth grades must spend at least 990 hours in class, while middle- and high-school students must spend at least 1,080 hours.

Another, similar bill awaiting hearings – House Bill 194 –  comes from the Legislative Finance Committee (LFC). The Public Education Department is also expected to propose legislation, but that bill hasn’t been filed yet.

One feature that distinguishes the LESC bill from its LFC counterpart is how teacher work time is counted. Work time is defined as “home visiting, parent-teacher conferences, educator training, professional development, mentorship, coaching, and collaboration.”

In House Bill 130, up to 60 hours of the 1,140 could come out of instructional time, which means actual class time would total 1,080 hours rather than 1,140.  The LFC bill would require many districts to provide 80 hours of teacher work time, but those hours would come on top of the 1,140 hours of instructional time.

“This (HB 130) supports teachers and teacher development,” said LESC Director Gwen Perea Warniment to the education committee. “They are the most important part of schools. They are vital. If there is ever a silver bullet in education it is the educators themselves in the classroom.”

The LESC bill would cost about $302 million per year to implement, while the LFC bill’s price tag would be substantially higher at $391 million. The bulk of the additional dollars would go to additional staff pay for extra hours of work.

If districts choose to add hours to the day rather than days to the school year, to meet the minimums, elementary schools would need to add about 25 minutes to each school day, while middle and high schools would add about half that much time. 

A bill that would change New Mexico’s

News

A new report examining the current status of school choice in three Western states – New Mexico, Colorado, and Idaho – finds plenty to celebrate combined with a number of challenges on the horizon.

The report was commissioned by Excellent Schools New Mexico, the Colorado League of Charter Schools, and Bluum, an Idaho nonprofit that helps develop new charter schools and school leaders. It was written by Alan Gottlieb, a Denver-based education writer and consultant.

While New Mexico charter schools, first authorized by a 1992 state law, got off to a slow and shaky start, Gottlieb writes, the sector has come on strong in the past several years, attracting national notice.

“Combining better authorizing with the growing influence of several school development and education advocacy nonprofits has, over the past three years, made New Mexico a player in the school choice arena for the first time,” the report says.  In fact, said Luke Ragland of The Daniels Fund, he finds the New Mexico school choice environment one of the most exciting in the nation.

“In five years, people will look back and will be writing stories about what happened in New Mexico’s charter school space,” Ragland said. “New Mexico is poised for some of the most impressive charter growth in the country.”

The report cites the emergence of organizations like NewMexicoKidsCAN, Excellent Schools New Mexico,Teach Plus New Mexico as a key reason the state’s families now have a wider array of high-quality school options from which to choose. 

Also, two longer-standing organizations, the Greater Albuquerque Chamber of Commerce and Public Charter Schools of New Mexico have become stronger and more effective in their advocacy, the report says.

The report also spotlights three “exemplar schools,” all charters: Altura Prep and Mission Achievement and Success (MAS) in Albuquerque, and Sidney Gutierrez in Roswell.

When it comes to challenges, the study touches on New Mexico’s funding inequities between charters and district-run schools, uneven charter authorizing leading to some low-quality schools opening and then being allowed to continue operating, and a lack of quality school options in many areas of the state.

National challenges on the horizon could have an impact in New Mexico as well, the study says. Most of them center on the widening national political divide, which tends to push people into mutually hostile opposing camps.

The report raises an alarm about a looming U.S. Supreme Court decision that could pave the way for religious-based charter schools. This could substantially erode support for charters as a whole, particularly among Democrats and the center-left.

A new report examining the current status

Quick Hits

A bill that would change New Mexico’s high school graduation requirements and reduce the number of credits needed for a diploma passed its first committee this week.

House Bill 126, passed on a 8-2 vote by the House Commerce and Economic Development Committee, would make a number of changes supporters say gives school districts more flexibility in determining what courses students need to complete to receive a diploma.

But people opposed to the bill pointed out that some of the changes could have damaging unintended consequences.

The bill would remove Algebra II and two semesters of foreign language as graduation requirements. Given that the University of New Mexico requires those courses for admission, people who spoke against the bill said it would limit options for some students.

“By removing these courses from the requirements for a diploma we will be putting students at risk of not being accepted into our state’s flagship university which currently require both,” said Daniel Macy, NewMexicoKidsCAN s external affairs manager. 

“Since the courses are no longer required, districts may choose to stop offering these courses to all students, which will prevent college bound students from having access to the courses they need to reach their dreams.”

Mandi Torrez, New Mexico’s teacher of the year for 2020, said moving Career and Technical Education and foreign languages to electives is “a step backwards, and we simply don’t understand why.”

Torrez, who currently serves as Education Reform Director for Think New Mexico, also said the removing foreign language and Algebra II requirements mean that New Mexico students could potentially graduate ineligible to attend 49 of the nation’s 50 flagship public universities.

State Rep. Patricia Lundstrom, a Gallup Democrat, spoke out strongly against the proposed changes, especially the dropping of Algebra II as a graduation requirement. Giving school districts flexibility sounds good in theory, but “if you happen to get saddled with a less than adequate superintendent or unskilled board, all of a sudden they’re going to take the easy way out for educating people.”

Lundstrom said the Yazzie-Martinez lawsuit grew out of just such a failure of school districts to provide a rigorous education. She said a “lack of leadership” is to blame for these failures.

“If we just turn this over and not require things like Algebra II and SAT exams, I think we’re dumbing down our students, and I’d hate to see that.”

A bill that would change New Mexico’s

News

For the first time in a decade, Albuquerque Public Schools has a set of five-year academic goals to work toward and measure the district’s effectiveness.

The three goals approved unanimously Wednesday by the APS Board of Education focus on early literacy proficiency, mathematics proficiency, and post-secondary readiness, with a special emphasis on the district’s most challenged students.

The goals emerged from work the board and district staff did with representatives from the Council of the Great City Schools as the board transitions to a new way of operating called Student Outcomes Focused Governance (SOFG).

Under SOFG, the school board sets goals for student outcomes, based on the community’s vision for the district, and guardrails, based on the community’s values for how the vision will be achieved.

The goals approved Thursday will be measured from a baseline established by scores on standardized state test administered later this year. They read as follows:

Goal 1: The percentage of third-grade students, from student groups named in the Yazzie-Martinez joint settlement plus African American students who demonstrate grade level proficiency or above on the state English Language Arts (ELA) summative assessment, will increase from X in May 2023 to Y in May 2028. (Metric to be determined upon receipt of 2023 results from the state, but shall not be less than a total of 10 point increase over five years.)

Goal 2: The percentage of eighth-grade students from groups named in the Yazzie-Martinez joint settlement plus African American students who demonstrate grade level proficiency or above on the state mathematics summative assessment will increase from X in May 2023 to Y in May 2028. (Metric to be determined upon receipt of 2023 results from the state, but shall not be less than a total of 10 point increase over five years.

Goal 3: The percentage of high school graduates who earn credit in two or more Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate, or Dual Credit courses, or earn an industry certification or Bilingual Seal, will increase from X in September 2023 to Y in September 2028.

The board will soon set interim benchmarks the district should aim for to be on track to meet the five-year goals. 

Until the new goals were approved this week, APS had operated for many years without any specific academic targets set by the board for the district’s students. The district has struggled historically with chronically low student achievement, low graduation rates and high dropout rates.

For the first time in a decade,

Quick Hits

In her 49-minute State of the State address Tuesday opening the 2023 legislative session, New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham spent eight minutes discussing public education without once mentioning the state’s dire student learning crisis.

Instead, Lujan Grisham focused on her administration’s “supercharged” investments in New Mexico’s education system. She also pushed several new initiatives, first unveiled in the Public Education Department budget proposal, including a longer school year and 4 percent across-the-board raises for teachers and other education workers.

Lujan Grisham said New Mexico’s public school teachers remain “criminally underpaid” despite big raises approved during last year’s legislative session, which she said made them the highest paid teachers in the southwest.

“You know what? They ought to be the highest paid educators in the United States of America,” she said to sustained applause. She also proposed covering health insurance premiums for teachers.

Legislators will also be asked to approve free school meals for all New Mexico students. “Too many kids are being forced to learn on an empty stomach,” Lujam Grisham said,

The governor also touted the Opportunity Scholarship program, which provides free college to all state residents. 

At the other end of the pipeline, she proposed a major investment to further bolster the state’s “constitutional right to early childhood education.”  She said the state can provide childcare and early education “for each and every one of our families by investing more than half a billion dollars in targeted funding.”

Lujan Grisham did not address Covid-related learning loss, nor the fact that on 2022 national test results, New Mexico had the nation’s lowest scores among the 50 states and Washington D.C.. 

In her 49-minute State of the State

Commentary

New Mexico legislators will gather this week in Santa Fe to kick-off a 60-day legislative session. This year’s session comes at a critical time for the future of public education in our state.

New Mexico students and families have endured tremendous challenges over the past three years. The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated the education crisis in New Mexico, and the state’s academic results are at their lowest point in decades. The largest education budget in our state’s history and a 60-day session provide a huge opportunity for lawmakers to create positive change for New Mexico’s students and the need is more urgent than ever. 

NewMexicoKidsCAN is committed to advocating for our state’s students and families by providing the information they need to follow the conversation and opportunities to engage in the political process. 

What is NewMexicoKidsCAN? We are a leading advocacy voice for equitable public education in New Mexico. We serve as a catalyst and conduit to advocate for community-informed, student-centered and research-backed education policies that work best for the children of New Mexico. 

By connecting policy, instructional practice and politics, we reimagine what is possible in New Mexico’s public education system.

We all have a part to play in ensuring that New Mexico’s education policies and programs create an excellent educational experience for our 300,000 students.

Our 2023 policy priorities reflect the urgency of this moment and our collective belief in the potential of our students:

Ensure New Mexico Students Receive Research-Based Instruction in Early Literacy

Reading is fundamental. Scientists have a greater understanding of how our brains learn to read than ever before. Unfortunately, our educational methods have not kept pace, and New Mexico needs to ensure that every student in kindergarten through second grade is learning to read in the best way. 

We will work to incentivize districts to adopt new curricular materials aligned with best practice so that every child has the best shot at learning to read.

Secure Funding to Enhance the New Mexico Funding Formula so At-Risk Students Receive the Support They Need

New Mexico’s education funding formula uses an imprecise tool to target funding to the New Mexico students and schools that need it most. NewMexicoKidsCAN will work to secure funding to explore improved ways to calculate the “at-risk” index at a school level.

Ensure Education Stimulus Funds Are Used to Address Lost Learning

New Mexico public schools received $1.6 billion in federal stimulus funds, intended to address lost learning. We will work to pass legislation that ensures the funding is monitored, well spent, and aligned toward improving student learning and provides parents with access to transparent information about how the money is being spent in their district. 

Create a Pathway for Community Educators

New Mexico students desire an education grounded in relevance and real-world application, especially in Career and Technical Education courses. As we encourage New Mexico students to explore the full range of options from college to career, we will utilize our community’s assets by creating a new pathway for career experts and tradesmen to serve as classroom educators. 

Advocate for Fair and Equitable Enrollment Processes

Every child deserves access to a high-quality public school, regardless of where they live. Unfortunately, antiquated address-based attendance zones can steal their opportunity. This year we will work to help the community understand the negative impact of attendance zones and how we can make quality schools available to all.

Ensure High-Quality Charter Schools Receive Approval for xpansion  

We will continue to ensure that New Mexico’s charter school authorizers recognize success by approving high-quality applications and supporting the growth of charter schools with a record of success. Similarly, we will hold authorizers accountable for addressing poor performance or financial issues at charter schools that are not delivering on their promises.

During this legislative session, we stand ready to advocate for New Mexico students and families. I hope you’ll join us!

Our 2023 policy priorities reflect the urgency

News

Pandemic-related learning loss will have significant negative economic impacts on the state and its residents through the rest of this century, a new study says.

New Mexico’s Gross Domestic Product will be 2.3 percent lower over the course of the 21st century than it would have been had the pandemic never occurred. And students who were in school during the Covid years will see 6.8 percent lower earnings over their lifetimes.

Those are the grim conclusions of a study conducted by the Hoover Institution, a right-leaning think-tank affiliated with Stanford University. 

The study examined, state-by-state, the disheartening results of last year’s National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) scores in reading and math among the nation’s fourth- and eighth-graders, then used “substantial economic analysis related to the U.S. labor market that allows direct estimation of the impact of the pandemic.”

According to the New Mexico section of the study, the economic loss to the state through this century will be $70 billion in current dollars.

“Even if education returns to its pre-pandemic quality, there is a cohort of students that will move through the future labor force with lower skills and achievement than those both before and after them,” says the study, written by Stanford’s Erik Hanushek. 

“This cohort will have lower lifetime earnings, and their reduced skills will, by historical observations, lead to a slowdown in growth (relative to what would have occurred without the pandemic).”

As reported last year, New Mexico ranked dead last among the states in NAEP scores across the two tests in both grades. New Mexico students, like their peers across the country, had lower proficiency rates on NAEP tests in 2022 than any time in recent memory. New Mexico’s scores were the lowest in a range from 13 to 30 years, depending on the grade and subject.

Results put New Mexico’s 4th grade math proficiency at its lowest point in 17 years (since 2005), and its 4th grade reading proficiency at its lowest point in 13 years (2009).  Results for 8th grade follow similar trends with math proficiency hitting its lowest point in 30 years (since 1992) and reading at a 15 year low (2007).

On the Hoover rankings of economic impact, New Mexico will suffer the 13th largest percentage loss in GDP, at 2.3 percent. Oklahoma will see the biggest loss, at 2.9 percent. Utah will have the smallest loss, at 0.6 percent.

“Students from Utah…can expect slightly less than a 2 percent loss of lifetime income. On the other hand, students from Delaware and Oklahoma can expect nearly a 9 percent loss in future income by virtue of impaired education during the pandemic,” Hanushek wrote.

New Mexico’s Gross Domestic Product will be