On a 4-3 vote, a divided Albuquerque Public Schools Board of Education reelected its three officers Thursday, meaning Yolanda Montoya-Cordova will remain as president through 2023.
Peggy Muller-Aragón will remain vice-president, and Courtney Jackson secretary.
Board member Danielle Gonzales was also nominated for president, and garnered three votes (including her own), falling one short of capturing the seat. She was supported by Jackson and Crystal Tapia-Romero. Those three board members were elected in 2021as candidates critical of the APS status quo..
When Montoya-Cordova was elected president a year ago, she said she would serve for just one year. On Wednesday, she said that “I think I’m still interested, if that was the will of the board.”
Board member Barabara Petersen nominated Montoya-Cordova, Muller-Aragón, and Jackson to keep their positions. Jackson initially resisted but ultimately accepted the nomination.
Jackson nominated Gonzales. “I believe Board Member Gonzalez has the tenacity to really drive us where we need to go in this next year,” she said. Jackson said that as the board transitions to a new governance model called Student Outcomes Focused Governance, new leadership would be helpful.
“We’re on the track but now we need the conductor who’s going to put it in gear and move us down,” she said.
Editor’s Note: Santa Fe early childhood educator Tara Hughes was recently named the New Mexico Teacher of the Year for 2023, the first ECE teacher ever to win the award. Hughes teaches at Nye Early Childhood Center in a four-year-old inclusion classroom (containing both special education and non-special education students). New Mexico Education spoke recently with Hughes about her background, how she came to teaching, and her beliefs about the importance of inclusion.The New Mexico Oil and Gas Association is the title sponsor for the New Mexico Teacher of the Year program for the fifth consecutive year and will support the travel needs and professional development opportunities of Hughes.
New Mexico Education: Tell us a bit about your background, and what led you to early childhood education.
Tara Hughes: I’m originally from Connecticut. My undergraduate degree is in technical theater and studio art. I moved out to New Mexico in 2000 to work for the Santa Fe Opera. I worked as an apprentice on the stage crew. Then they hired me as a carpenter and a welder for the winter months. I stayed on and then I realized what I loved so much about the opera was working with college students and supporting them and teaching them the ins and outs of theater and how to put on a show. I started really falling in love with teaching then, and that’s what catapulted me into going into education.
NME: How did you actually make the jump from theater into teaching?
Hughes: I met my husband here when I was at the opera, and we moved to upstate New York, where I started teaching as an educational assistant in a small preschool. It was all neurodiverse children. I saw the collaboration between related service providers and the special education teachers, how they supported families and students. I said to my husband, I think this is what I want to do. I want to go into early childhood special education. And so after that, we moved back to Mexico and I got my master’s at New Mexico Highlands University.
I student-taught in an autism specific classroom at Nye, and they hired me as an early childhood special education teacher right after I was done student-teaching. I have been at Nye for nine years.
NME: Can you define the term neurodiverse for our readers?
Tara Hughes
Hughes: It might be a child or a person with autism. It might be a person with Down Syndrome. It might be a person who receives speech and language services. So neuro-divergence is someone whose thinking is a little different. Their brain works a little differently than, as we say, a neurotypical person’s brain.
NME: What was it that attracted you specifically to working with neurodiverse students?
Hughes: It is really beautiful to see the differences in students and to watch their progress, watch them flourish and to see the gains that they make. And to work with children to help them understand that everyone learns differently. We can all be successful, we can all learn, and we all have strengths. I love finding those strengths in each child.
NME: Yours is a full inclusion classroom. Can you describe what that means, and why it is important?
Hughes: We’re all learning with the same curriculum, learning side-by-side. My neuro typically developing students support my students who are neurodiverse and model language for them. They model friendship skills, they model self regulation. And we all build a really strong community together.
What the inclusion classroom highlights is diversity and understanding each child’s differences. My students who are neurotypical come out with the understanding that we all learn differently. There’s this understanding, this empathy that grows within each child. What we’re looking at for the rest of our lives is being able to have that sense of belonging and understanding of differences. So, the challenges that come along with that is teaching students and teaching children that we’re all we’re all the same in some ways, but we have to celebrate each other’s differences and understand one another.
NME: Have you been able to keep track of some of your students as they’ve grown older to gauge the impact of having been in your inclusive classroom?
Hughes: I’m fortunate that I have worked with wonderful families who still keep in contact with me, and many of my neurodiverse students are now in inclusion classrooms in elementary school. The work we did at Nye helped them be successful in an inclusion classroom in an elementary school, and provide them with strategies that they can use.
I’ve talked to parents of my neurotypical students who are now in older grades and they talk about how their child understands those differences now or has a really good friend with Down Syndrome and includes that child in their birthday parties. It’s really beautiful to see. I’d like to believe that I helped them understand that those differences should be accepted and celebrated.
NME: Congratulations, by the way, on being the first early childhood teacher to win this honor.
Hughes: Thank you. I am really honored to be able to increase the recognition of early childhood educators.
The proposed $4.1 billion Public Education Department 2023 budget for support to New Mexico’s schools presented to lawmakers Thursday would boost spending by $241 million – or 6.3 percent – over this year.
Despite New Mexico’s ongoing struggles with student learning – the state ranked dead last this year on national assessments – members of the Legislative Finance Committee asked no tough or probing questions of Secretary of Education Kurt Steinhaus during a 90-minute hearing.
The most significant and costly new item in the budget is a mandatory increase in instructional hours statewide from 990 to 1,140 per year – requiring an additional $261.1 million. This would be largely offset by eliminating funding for the existing Extended Learning Time and K-5 Plus programs that added days and hours but were underutilized by districts.
The proposal also calls for an additional $50 million of optional “enhanced extended learning options, for those who want to continue their participation in K5+ or other extended learning time that would exceed the new hourly requirement.
Thursday’s hearing is just the first step toward a final K-12 education budget – which comprises 45 percent of the state budget. The governor’s office also presents a budget, as does the Legislative Education Study Committee and the Legislative Finance Committee. The various proposals are debated and the final budget is set during the legislative session.
A budget spreadsheet distributed to LFC members Thursday was a bit challenging to decipher, with multiple categories and subtotals making it hard to get a grasp on total amounts and increases.
Other notable items in the proposed budget include:
$109.3 million for 4 percent raises across the board. Steinhaus said the state needs to fill 600 teaching vacancies, keep up with cost-of-living increases, and remain regionally competitive.
More than doubling to $15.3 million in the cost of statewide standardized assessments, from the current year’s $7.2 million. Steinhaus said the proposed amount reflects actual costs. “(PED) got in the habit of getting federal money here, sweeping the corners over there and just pulling a bunch of stuff together. And that’s not the way to run a railroad,” he said. “You need to be upfront with your finance committee about what the real cost is. And that’s what the real cost is.”
$16.5 million for early literacy and reading support. This includes additional training in the science of reading as well as new regional literacy coaches.
$17 million to boost attendance programs and dropout prevention
$11.5 million to expand community schools, an area where the budget has grown substantially over the past several years.
$10 million for high-dosage tutoring, an intervention that has proved effective across the country in helping ameliorate Covid-19 related learning loss. The PED proposal says funds would provide 5,439 students with three hours of tutoring per week for 26 weeks.
$3.3 million to increase minimum principal salaries. This would boost the minimum salary by $3,500 dollars and would affect 64 percent of the state’s principals.
In addition to $3.9 billion in public school support, Steinhaus also asked legislators for a 17 percent increase in the PED budget for its internal operations – from $20.9 million to $24.3 million.
Steinhaus said the department needs more money to implement state statutes and federal requirements; Address the Martinez/Yazzie case and other court rulings; support equity, language and culture; analyze data and communicate results; and “reduce administrative complexity.”
State Sen. William Burt, an Alamogordo Republican, expressed the only mild dissent to the budget proposal. “How often do you evaluate the programs within PED and either cut them back or shift the money to maybe a better way (of doing things)? Burt asked Steinhaus. “So that we can be using the taxpayer dollars more efficiently and getting better results out of that money.”
Steinhaus replied that the evaluation process is “continuous” within the department, and that all programs are viewed through the lens of whether they are improving student achievement, graduation rates, and attendance.
“If (a program) is not working, it didn’t show up here in this package,”Steinhaus said.
New Mexico’s overall K-12 academic performance is “deeply concerning” and a failure by the state Public Education Department to provide sufficient data to make detailed analysis possible obscures the magnitude of the challenges, making them harder to address strategically.
Those are the main conclusions of a new report from the Denver-based Keystone Policy Center commissioned by the advocacy group NewMexicoKidsCAN.
Accompanying the report is a detailed, searchable online map that allows the public to dive deep into information on specific schools and districts.
While the student achievement data Keystone analyzed were released earlier this fall, researchers dug more deeply into the numbers to the extent possible given PED’s limited data. They found some isolated bright spots amid the generally gloomy numbers, but stressed their analysis was hampered by the state’s data policies.
“Current reporting structures do not allow for analyses done in other states such as correlations between demographics and performance,” the report says. “A core function of State Education Agencies is clear and transparent reporting of data to the public which must be improved in New Mexico. Common terminology, classification and format of reporting will assist stakeholders in understanding the data; NMPED must become a leader in this area.”
One of the biggest shortcomings in PED data is that “For any school or (district) in which the proficiency rate is below 20 percent or above 80 percent, it is only noted as such without specifics.” In other words, a district or school’s proficiency rate could be at 2 percent on a given test, but the data would show only that it was below 20 percent. Or a school could have a 99 percent proficiency rate, but the data would show only that it was at 80 percent or better.
Keystone also said demographic data can be hard to locate, and what is available tends to be at the school level only, rather than for districts as a whole. But in many small schools, the number of students in any demographic group are often so low that those numbers are suppressed so that students aren’t individually identifiable.
“This results in a lot of suppressed data that does not allow stakeholders to understand how a school’s demographics compare to an overall (district’s) population,” the report says. “It is particularly prevalent when looking at subgroup data, limiting our ability to fully understand how different groups of students perform, and the extent of academic gaps between groups of students.”
Another hole in state data is a lack of student growth data. This is unavoidably caused by the switch this year to the New Mexico Measures of Student Success & Achievement (NMMSSA) test for grades 3-8. This makes comparison to previous years’ results impossible, eliminating academic growth calculations.
New Mexico’s reticence with data is surprising, given how many challenges the state’s education system faces, and how looking at meaningful data could help policymakers and educators understand the magnitude of those challenges, said Van Schoales, Keystone’s senior policy director.
“New Mexico is arguably the most challenging state in the country when it comes to issues of poverty,” Schoales said. “That obviously has a huge impact on public education. Not only does good data help in figuring out where schools are adding value in terms of learning, but it also helps people address how to go after some of the other issues related to poverty as well.”
Despite these data limitations, Keystone conducted an in-depth analysis of this year’s early literacy, New Mexico Measures of Student Success & Achievement (NM-MSSA), New Mexico Assessment of Science Readiness (NM-ASR), and SAT results.
Among the key findings:
Native American Students have a proficiency rate of under 20 percent across the state
Free and reduced lunch-eligible students have a proficiency rate of under 20 percent in math, and rates of 26 percent in English Language Arts (ELA), and 22 percent in early literacy.
In ELA, 51 (of 89) school districts have proficiency rates below the state average of 34 percent, and 10 have proficiency rates below 20 percent, while 39 districts have proficiency rates equal to or greater than the state average.
In early literacy, a key predictor of future academic success, 22 districts have proficiency rates below 20 percent.
In math, 55 districts have proficiency rates below the state average of 25 percent, 35 of which have proficiency rates below 20 percent.
Most of the 14 Local Education Agency (LEA) entities with ELA proficiency above 50 percent among low-income students are charter schools.
The report also found some bright spots in the data. Some small districts – Corona, Texico, Fort Sumner, Maxwell, Mosquero, Springer, and Lovington, exceeded state averages with various subgroups of students.
Keystone has several recommendations for brightening New Mexico’s educational outlook. The report suggests that the state study outlier districts and schools – many of them charters – to see what can be gleaned from their practices.
It also urges the PED to disseminate best practices research to districts across the state, and assist districts in implementing them.
The report also urges the state to develop a statewide plan for improvement including measurable goals.
Finally, Keystone urges the PED to improve its data collection and dissemination. “Different reports from different departments at NMPED report data in different ways and use different terminology which makes it challenging to understand.”
The bottom line, Schoales said, is that “there is an opportunity in New Mexico to do a great deal more with data. And the state should seize that opportunity.”
Editor’s note: Bernalillo Public Schools is making creative use of the state-funded Extended Learning Time Program. Under the program, districts can opt into receiving funding to extend the school year by 10 days. In Bernalillo, the district has opted for a modified approach. For 2022-23, the school year is being extended by five days. The additional five days will be used for parent and community engagement, holding community events on Saturdays and evenings to help parents learn more about what the schools are hoping to accomplish with their children, and how parents can work at home with their children to boost their learning.
New Mexico Education interviewed Bernalillo Superintendent Matt Montaño to learn more about the district’s unique approach to Extended Learning Time.
New Mexico Education: How did you come up with the idea for what you call community learning?
Superintendent Matt Montaño: For the first time during COVID, families got to see behind the curtain of the classroom in real time, because their kids were in class, and you had a teacher on the other side, doing some instruction or providing some type of assignment and the parents were there with their kids watching whatever was happening – good, bad, or in the middle.
My premise was that now that they have some kind of inclination of what’s happening in the classroom, have we done our part as an education system to really engage them in and inform them about what we’re trying to accomplish? Parents entrust their kids to us, but we never clearly, as an educational system, let them know what we’re trying to do.
Even when you think about traditional parent-teacher conferences or open houses, they’re kind of check-the-box events. Parents come in, they ask questions: How’s my kid behaving? We want to go beyond that.
Now that we opened up the classroom during COVID, let’s really open up the schools. Instead of us thinking of parents as just the parents of our students, let’s think of them as our partners in their students’ education.
NME: So how does this new approach look in Bernalillo?
Montaño: We added five additional days to the end of our calendar. We added another five days on Saturdays throughout the school year. Those Saturdays are specifically to do what we’re calling community learning.
The idea is that we engage families in the arts, in music, in games, and things of that nature, while we’re simultaneously engaging them and their kids in learning that’s occurring in the classroom. We’re teaching them techniques for working at home on learning with their kids. We’re talking to them about what we’re trying to accomplish with some of these techniques. And so all of a sudden, you’ve combined a carnival atmosphere with the classroom atmosphere, and it has really yielded results.
We had our first community learning event on September 10. Each of our 10 schools held events at their schools. It was very successful, and about 1,200 people participated.
Our second Saturday was October 22. We decided to have parents and students from all 10 of our schools come to Bernalillo High School. We provided buses for free to get people there. Each school adopted three classrooms where they held learning events. So there were 30 classrooms for our parents and our students to go through.
We also had a harvest festival tied to it. We gave out free food. We had vendors come in- the vendors that provide us nutrition services. They gave food tasting opportunities so that families could give feedback on the types of foods that they would like their kids to get for school lunch.
More than 3,000 people showed up, which is an amazing turnout. We had kids who brought parents, uncles, aunts, grandma, grandpa. There were people from the community who don’t even have kids in the school system anymore. They came in and said hey, we want to be a part of this. And that was really powerful for us because now it has created unique partnerships that we can tap into for providing tutoring services.
So it was also about saying hey, education is not just a school issue. It’s a community issue and community involvement is extremely important for schools to thrive.
NME: Can you describe in more detail what some of the in-classroom and out-of-classroom offerings were that day?
Montaño: In some classrooms we had live literacy instruction, where teachers were leading instruction and parents and students had an opportunity to work together. The parents got insight into what the instruction in our schools looks like and how they can better support their students at home. Other classrooms had similar instruction going on in math.
On the non-academic side, we really wanted to tap into the cultural strengths and assets of our community; the languages, the cultural assets. So in addition to the harvest festival we had a low-rider exhibition. People like beautiful cars and that’s part of our community. We can have high, rigorous academic expectations and outcomes and this cultural component as well.
We had agricultural exhibitions because that is also an important part of our community.
NME: What will the rest of the ELTP events look like?
Montaño: Most of them will probably be back at individual school sites. One piece of feedback I received from families was that their weekends are busy with soccer, youth sports leagues, and other family obligations. So we are looking at probably moving some of these events to weekday evenings. The harvest festival was such a success I think we will make that an annual event.
NME: What else have you and your district learned from this experience?
Montaño: We often think of innovation as technology. I think of innovation as, for example, looking at our schedules differently. Our education systems still largely haven’t changed since the 1950s. How do we look to restructure how our days look, how our weeks look, who participates in the educational process now and moving forward? That is actually going to be the game-changing element.
We’ve got to keep our eyes on high standards. We’ve got to keep our eyes on proficiency and getting kids to achieve at high levels. How we get there doesn’t have to look cookie-cutter. That’s the key to what we’re trying to accomplish.
Among the recommendations in the report, presented to the Legislative Education Study Committee (LESC) in mid-November, is a complete reboot of principal preparation programs across the state.
“Addressing principal licensure programs is the first step to a comprehensive strategy to building a statewide bench of effective leaders,” the report says. “Programs across the state often fail to reflect research-based components…Some traditional programs overemphasize “sit-and-get” learning while other programs offer inconsistent quality. As a result, many school leaders feel underprepared for the role, especially to lead schools that experience the greatest challenges in teaching and learning conditions.”
Some members of the LESC endorsed the licensure overhaul recommendation, but wondered whether the state’s universities have the capacity or desire to change.
“It’s really difficult sometimes to get our universities to shift one way or the other. They’re pretty set in their ways in a lot of areas,” State Sen. Gay Kernan, a Hobbs Republican, said during the LESC meeting.
The Chamber commissioned the report from Education Research and Development, a Massachusetts based research and policy consulting company. The organization has done similar work, most notably in Illinois, where it was well received.
Chamber President and CEO Terri Cole said it made sense for the Chamber to produce the report because “as business leaders we are naturally inclined to believe and understand that leadership is essential to continuous improvement and ultimately to the success of any organization.”
The report recommends that New Mexico “redesign and relaunch” principal preparation programs to “meet the challenge of adequate and equitable educational opportunities for schools as called for by the Martinez/Yazzie court ruling.”
Those programs should be offered state grants to start new programs “in line with evidence-based best practices, including a full-time residency requirement.”
There are several other notable recommendations in the report as well, including:
An update of compensation systems to “incentivize interest in school leadership roles and improve retention.” Currently, principals aren’t paid enough for the additional skill, responsibilities, and stress required by leadership positions, the report says. There is also no incentive in principal pay for building leaders to “maintain knowledge and skills by engaging in continuous learning opportunities to maintain their license.”
Better access for all principals to ongoing professional development. “The most common opportunities tend to be “one-shot” conferences and workshops that do not reflect best practices of sustained development over time with an emphasis on practicing new skills and receiving coaching,” the report says.
Establishment by the state legislature of a statewide intensive mentoring program for all first-year principals.
Increased state capacity to support school leaders. The report recommends that the New Mexico Public Education Department create an Office of School and District Leadership. The report suggests that PED “could benefit from an external organization that advocates for a comprehensive, sustained, and rigorous focus on school leadership and aims to hold the State accountable to that mission.”
The state’s philanthropies should “invest in an advocacy organization to hold all of state government – including executive agencies, the Legislature, and higher education institutions – accountable for deploying high-standards school leader programming that improves school and student performance.”
Los Lunas Schools Superintendent Arsenio Romero attended the LESC hearing and said he supported the report’s findings. Romero is also a New Mexico State University regent.
“Investing and developing our school leaders is crucial to the success and outcomes of our students,” Romero said. “By investing in the development of local school leaders not only do you get a better leader, you get a better school.”
Romero said he strongly believes in mentorship programs as a way to develop strong leaders. “Connection is key. Relationships are gold. It is the fastest way to growth, success, and getting the outcomes we want.,” he said.
People need to push to see that this overhaul takes place, he said. “The idea that leaders grow when engaging in leadership training seems like common sense. And it is. Unfortunately, it is not common practice,” he said “New Mexico needs this to happen. This will dramatically improve public education in the state.”
Well over half of New Mexicans feel pessimistic about the direction of the state’s public education system and many aren’t thrilled with the job their local school boards are doing either.
Those are some of the findings of a public opinion poll commissioned by a consortium of education groups and conducted last August.
The poll also showed significant support for school turnarounds that include replacing school leaders and staff, but less appetite for closing schools altogether.
The generally downbeat assessment about public schools and their governance cuts across racial, socioeconomic, gender, age and geographical lines. More charter school parents, however, are complimentary of the education their children receive (62 percent) than are parents of students in district-run schools (32 percent).
But charter parents take a dimmer view of district-run schools than do parents whose children attend district schools. That’s the case with Stephanie Porter, a resident of Albuquerque’s low-income International District, whose second-grade daughter attends Whittier Elementary School.
Whittier, until recently one of the struggling Albuquerque Public Schools’ most low-performing schools, has been involved in a turnaround in recent years that is beginning to show strong results. Porter said she is thrilled with her daughter’s educational experience there, even as she is aware of the district’s overall struggles.
“I am only one of the few parents who is satisfied with APS because I have a fantastic principal and fantastic staff at Whittier,” she said. “But the problem I see is that kids need more social-emotional support. The teachers are having to function a lot of the time as social workers, and it’s disrupting learning. I wish that my school would receive more funding from the district.”
Porter also said she is feeling positive about the APS board, which elected a new majority last year favoring a change in direction. “The new school board members seem to really care about the students and student outcomes and want to refocus on that,” she said.
Here are some poll details:
Asked whether education in New Mexico is headed in the right direction or gotten off track, 61 percent of respondents said it has gotten off track, with just 28 percent saying it is headed in the right direction. One-third of Hispanic respondents gave a positive response, while just 23 percent of white respondents did.
Geographically, the highest negative responses were in northwest New Mexico, where just 15 percent of respondents said education is headed in the right direction. In Albuquerque Metro, only 20 percent said education was moving in the right direction.
Asked on a scale of 1 to 5 whether the local school board was not effective at all (1) or very effective (5) 36 percent of respondents statewide gave their board a 1 or 2, while 23 percent answered with a 4 or 5. Just over a third of respondents ranked their board in the middle – a 3.
There weren’t significant variations across subgroups.
On the issue of improving schools that are struggling, 70 percent of respondents agreed that the state should move aggressively to turn around the lowest-performing schools by replacing principals and staff and providing additional funding. Just 13 percent disagreed.
The strongest support – 79 percent – came from people with a high school education or less. By contrast, 59 percent of people with graduate degrees expressed support.
Only 46 percent of respondents supported more draconian measures, including closing down a school altogether and repurposing the building to meet a community need. Older respondents favored this approach more heavily: 60 percent of people 65 and older were in favor, while just 43 percent of 18- to 34-year-olds approved.
Across the political spectrum, respondents supported an easy-to-understand state school rating system. The system in place in New Mexico was dismantled shortly after Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham, a Democrat, took office in 2019. Three-quarters of Democrats (74 percent), however, favor a rating system, as do 73 percent of Republicans and78 percent of independents.
Pollsters conducted phone interviews of 601 New Mexicans in August, and the poll has a margin of error of 4 percent.
It was commissioned by NewMexicoKidsCAN, Public Charter Schools of New Mexico, Excellent Schools New Mexico, the Greater Albuquerque Chamber of Commerce, and Teach Plus New Mexico. It touched on a range of issues, including perceptions of the quality of education in New Mexico and perceptions of and support for charter schools.
You can read previous NewMexico Education stories on poll results here and here.
The Albuquerque Public Schools Board of Education is convening a series of five community conversations beginning tonight, and what board members hear will provide important context as the district begins developing a new strategic plan.
The board recently underwent training conducted by the Council of the Great City Schools on a new district governance model called Student Outcomes Focused Governance. The training helped unify the board behind a different approach to its oversight of the district, according to board member Courtney Jackson.
“You can just feel a change in the energy of what the school board is going to do,” Jackson said. Soliciting community members’ input about what really matters in their children’s education is a vital first step,” Jackson said.
“We were elected to represent the values and the vision of what the community wants,” Jackson said. “The only way we can truly understand what that vision is so that we can define the goals is to have two-way conversations with the community.”
The board will use what it hears to develop goals and guardrails that Superintendent Scott Elder and his team will use in developing the strategic plan.
Under Student Outcomes Focused Governance, the school board dedicates much of its attention and energy to issues that directly affect student learning. Jackson said that during the training, board members were surprised to learn that they had spent about 10 percent of their meeting time on discussing student learning.
“That was fairly eye-opening,” she said.
The community meetings will take place in every district of the city. The schedule is as follows, with each meeting running from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m.:
Nov. 9 at Rio Grande High School, 2300 Arenal Road SW
Nov. 14 at Eldorado High School, 11300 Montgomery Blvd. NE
Nov. 17 at Jefferson Middle School, 712 Girard Blvd. NE
Dec. 1 at Cibola High School, 1510 Ellison Drive NW
Dec. 5 at Albuquerque High School (all Spanish session), 800 Odelia Road. NE
The meetings will be facilitated by school board members. After the five meetings have concluded, the Council of the Great City Schools will analyze the information so that the board understands the community’s top priorities.
As a hypothetical example, Jackson said if one of the top findings is that the community wants APS to improve early literacy proficiency rates, the board will then direct Elder to “improve third-grade proficiency from, say, 32 percent to 60 percent within a proscribed period of time, like three or five years,” she said.
The board hopes to have that information by early January so it can begin developing goals to pass onto district leadership. The district will use those goals to begin developing the strategic plan.
“We don’t want to start next school year without a strategic plan in place,” Jackson said.
Significant discrepancies in proficiency rates between gold-standard national tests and New Mexico’s new state assessment suggest that New Mexico might have lowered the bar this year, masking just how far behind its students are, according to a national policy expert.
A review of 2022 results of fourth- and eighth-grade math and literacy tests (two grades the national test covers) from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) and New Mexico Measures of Student Success and Achievement (NM-MSSA) show higher proficiency rates on the state test than NAEP ranging from 5 to 15 percentage points. Gaps are higher on the reading tests than the math exams.
On NAEP, 21 percent of the state’s fourth-graders scored proficient or better in reading, while on NM-MSSA, 35 percent were proficient or better. On eighth-grade reading, 18 percent were proficient or better on NAEP, while 33 percent hit or exceeded that target on NM-MSSA.
Math gaps were a bit smaller. On NAEP, 19 percent of fourth-graders were proficient or better, compared to 24 percent on NM-MSSA. Just 13 percent of eighth-graders were proficient or better on NAEP math, while 20 percent were proficient on NM-MSSA.
New Mexico students had the lowest scores on NAEP among the 50 states and Washington D.C., according to results released in late October.
While the two tests are very different from one another and no one should expect them to align perfectly, the consistent gaps suggest the state test lacks rigor and might not reveal whether New Mexico students are being prepared for a successful life after high school. That’s the view of Michael Petrilli, president of the conservative-leaning Thomas B. Fordham Institute.
Petrilli has been writing about the so-called ‘honesty gap’ between state and national tests for at least seven years. The nonprofit Collaborative for Student Success defines the honesty gap as states exaggerating the proficiency rates of their students by setting rates lower than those established by NAEP.
In 2015, Petrilli wrote an article for Education Next magazine praising then-new state assessments proliferating across the country that were tied to Common Core State Standards. PARCC, which New Mexico jettisoned in 2019, was one of those tests,
While many states have stuck with those rigorous exams, New Mexico appears to be a troubling exception Petrilli said in an interview this week with New Mexico Education.
“State tests generally have remained relatively rigorous as compared to NAEP, so they are much closer to closing that honesty gap than they used to be,” Petrilli said. “And so the fact that New Mexico is now returning to the days of setting a much lower standard, that does make it an outlier.
“Of course, that’s the last thing you want to do when you find yourself in last place.”
There are reasons to view these results, and the discrepancies between them, with caution and avoid jumping to definitive conclusions, Petrilli said. “Last school year was still a weird year, with the Omicron variant and some disruptions and chaos still occurring,” he said. “So we might want to wait for two years from now (when NAEP is next administered) to see if the same patterns holds in New Mexico, or if we revert to normal. I think that’s unlikely, but it is possible.”
Petrilli floated another possible explanation for the discrepancy: NAEP was administered a couple of months earlier than the state test, and kids could potentially have learned a significant amount during that time. Again, he said he doubted it would account for such a big gap.
After decades of assessments that lacked rigor, when parents were given rosy but erroneous information about how well school was preparing their children for a successful life, states made progress in telling a truer story. Why would New Mexico want to go backwards? That’s a question Petrilli said state policymakers and officials should ask themselves.
“It’s important in terms of the message it sends to educators about what the goal is – what are you actually trying to achieve?” Petrilli said. “And of course it’s important in terms of the message it sends to kids and to parents.
“States have a responsibility to at least try to communicate to parents the truth about whether kids are on track for success or not.”
While the high-level view is grim of New Mexico fourth- and eighth-grade students’ performance on national 2022 math and literacy tests released this week, a deeper look at the data reveals even more troubling truths.
Significantly more New Mexico students scored below basic – far below proficiency – in 2022 than in 2019, the last time the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) was administered. Those numbers look even worse for the state’s low-income students and students of color, who comprise the majority of students in the state.
New Mexico’s results should give everyone pause, but people aren’t paying sufficient attention, said Amanda Aragon, executive director of NewMexicoKidsCAN, an education advocacy organization.
“I am afraid people are not aware of the dire implications of this data,” Aragon said. “The growth in students performing below basic in reading and math tells us that many of our students do not have the most basic literacy and numeracy skills. Without urgent course correction this will be catastrophic for the future of our children, our communities, our state and our country.”
Let’s dive into the numbers, their meaning, and their implications.
Reading
Fourth grade
Scoring below basic in fourth-grade reading means a student cannot recognize an explicitly stated detail in an informational text; recognize a description of a character’s action explicitly stated in a story; or recognize the meaning of an idiom used in an expository article.
More than half of New Mexico fourth-graders (52 percent) scored below basic in reading. In 2019, 47 percent of students scored below basic. Federal education officials consider that a significant increase in below basic scores.
Just 21 percent scored proficient or advanced – defined by NAEP as “demonstrating solid academic performance and competency over challenging subject matter.”
Yet even those numbers mask the magnitude of the crisis. Some 71 percent of Native American students scored below basic in fourth-grade reading. Only 10 percent were at or above proficiency
And 55 percent of Hispanic students – who comprise the majority of New Mexico public school students – scored below basic, while just 20 percent were at or above proficiency.
Low-income students also struggled – 57 percent scored below basic, with 17 percent at or above proficiency.
Eighth grade
In eighth grade, being below basic means, among other things, that a student cannot use information from an article to provide an answer to a question posed in the article; recognize the meaning of a word as it is used in a specific context; or describe an explicitly stated key idea from a science article.
The numbers look only marginally better for eighth-grade reading – 43 percent of students were below basic in reading, compared to 39 percent in 2019. Eighteen percent score proficient or advanced.
Key subgroups or students performed below. that statewide average. As in fourth grade, Native American eighth-graders were the lowest performing group, with 53 percent below basic and just 9 percent at or above proficiency.
Among Hispanic students, 48 percent scored below basic, and 14 percent at or above proficiency.
Low-income students mirrored Hispanic students, with 48 percent below basic and 13 percent proficient or advanced.
Math
Fourth grade
If New Mexico’s NAEP reading scores are cause for concern, then math scores provide no reassurance. Scoring below basic in fourth-grade math means a student is unable to find a total in a representation of money, even using a calculator (what is the total amount of a five dollar bill a one dollar bill, and two quarters); name a location specified by coordinates; or identify appropriate measurements from a context (height, weight, and volume).
Forty percent of New Mexico’s eighth-graders were below basic in 2022 NAEP results. In 2019, 28 percent were below basic. The 12 percentage point increase was flagged by NAEP as a worrisome drop.
Among Native American students, 52 percent were below basic and 10 percent were at or above proficiency.
Among Hispanic students, 42 percent were below basic and 16 percent were proficient or advanced.
And among low-income students, 45 percent were below basic and 15 percent were at or above proficiency.
Eighth grade
The most dismal results were in eighth-grade math. Being below basic in eighth-grade math means being unable to select a graph that best represents given data; determine the shortest path between two points; or determine a ratio from a story problem.
In New Mexico, 55 percent of eighth-graders scored below basic in math. That represents a significant drop from 2019, when 44 percent were below basic.
As with the other exams, Native American students were the lowest performing group, with 66 percent below basic and only 5 percent at proficiency.
Among Hispanic students, 59 were below basic and 9 percent were proficient and advanced.
Among low-income students, 60 percent were below basic and 9 percent proficient and advanced.
While New Mexico’s numbers are far worse than national averages, education advocates across the country are calling this year’s NAEP scores a national call to arms.
““We are talking about a really serious erosion of children’s capacities to read and count in the next generation of the workforce, and so this becomes a global economic issue for America,” said Bev Purdue the former Democratic governor of North Carolina.
