Connect with:
Wednesday / January 15.
logo
mobile-logo
HomeStandard Blog Whole Post (Page 17)
News

New Mexico’s fourth- and eighth-grade students took a big step backwards in math and reading during the Covid-19 pandemic, newly released data from gold-standard national tests shows. 

According to results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), commonly known as the Nation’s Report Card, New Mexico students, like their peers across the country, had lower proficiency rates on NAEP tests in 2022 than any time in recent memory. The scores were the lowest in a range from 13 to 30 years, depending on the grade and subject.

While the national news was grim, it’s even worse for New Mexico, which ranks dead last among the 50 states and Washington D.C. on all four tests – fourth and eighth grade reading and math, according to charts compiled by the New York Times.

In a meeting with district and charter school leaders Monday morning, New Mexico Education Secretary Kurt Steinhaus acknowledged the challenges but tried to rally the troops with a pep talk. 

“I would say from the chair I sit in this doesn’t knock us off our game,” Steinhaus said. “One of the phrases that echoes in my head is we can do better and we will do better. In fact, I think New Mexico is already doing better in mathematics and reading and it’s because of the hard work you all are doing there in New Mexico in trying to to move that needle.”

It’s hard to draw optimism from the NAEP numbers, however:

  • 4th grade reading proficiency: 21% 
  • 4th grade mathematics proficiency: 19% 
  • 8th grade reading proficiency: 18% 
  • 8th grade mathematics proficiency: 13%

These 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).

Amanda Aragon, executive director of NewMexicoKidsCAN, a nonprofit that advocates for community-informed, student-centered and research-backed education policies, said the NAEP results leave no room for complacency. 

“Many New Mexicans have become far too comfortable with a bottom of the list ranking for education in our beautiful state. Today’s results sound an urgent call to action,” Aragon said. “To create the change our system needs, every one of us should ask ourselves what we can do to ensure our students receive the education they deserve. We must come together and demand urgent action.”

Steinhaus said in his travels across the state this school year, he has seen encouraging signs that learning will accelerate. “My advice to you at your school district or your charter school is to stay on your path. Keep moving forward. Let’s give our teachers and our hard working staff out there a little pep talk. Let them know good work they’re doing day in and day out is appreciated and recognized and that’s what it’s all about.”

The National Assessment Governing Board also released results Monday of the Trial Urban District Assessment (TUDA). Albuquerque Public Schools is among 27 districts that participate in that program.

NAEP-TUDA results showed that in APS:

  • 4th grade reading proficiency was at 25% — the lowest since 2017.
  • 4th grade mathematics proficiency was at: 24% — the lowest since TUDA was first administered in 2011.
  • 8th grade reading proficiency was at 21% — the lowest since 2017.
  • 8th grade mathematics proficiency was at 17% — the lowest since TUDA was first administered in 2011.

New Mexico’s fourth- and eighth-grade students took

News

Three-quarters of New Mexicans support the expansion of charter schools and believe charters help make education better in the state, results of a statewide poll show.

The poll, commissioned by a consortium of education groups and conducted in August, also found that 82 percent of respondents favor expanded public school choice in their communities.

Support for charter expansion crosses racial, ethnic, socio-economic, and geographic lines, the poll shows. Results are equally strong among high school graduates and people with advanced degrees.

The overwhelmingly pro-charter poll results are “a testament to the folks who have done the work to open a charter school in their community,” said Matt Pahl, executive director of Public Charter Schools of New Mexico. “People are increasingly seeing charters as a good path for their kids, and good for kids in their community in general.”

Reeve Mora is one such parent. After living through repeated principal and teacher turnover at the Albuquerque Public Schools elementary school her two oldest children attended, and feeling that the latest principal did not prioritize safety, she moved her children to Corrales International, a K-12 charter school not far from her home.

There, she said, she feels heard and respected. More important, she said, the school welcomes parents asking questions and being involved. “Parents need to know that it’s OK to question how schools are doing things, their philosophy and values,  and what their end goal is.”

Mora said she wasn’t surprised to learn that the poll showed parents want more public school choice. Regardless of whether students are homeschooled, attend a charter or a district-run school, parents want to know their children are safe, and that the learning environment suits them.  “And if not, you should have the option to choose a school that has closer to (what) you’re looking for.”

Digging more deeply into the data reveals some interesting nuggets. Despite teachers union opposition to charter school expansion, 69 percent of union members in New Mexico support charter school growth and believe charters help improve public education.

And even three-quarters of people who believe public education in the state is headed in the right direction support the expansion of charter school options, and see charters as a positive influence on public education in New Mexico.

People were even more overwhelmingly positive on the more general question of more public school choices in their communities. More than 80 of white respondents, Hispanic respondents, and those who identified as ‘other’ want more public school choice.

Pahl said the results show that an increasing focus on not just school choice but high quality options is paying off.

He also pointed out that even in regions of the state like the southeast, where few charter schools exist, people are overwhelmingly supportive of charter expansion. “The reputation of charter schools is preceding them,” Pahl said. It’s up to us to ensure that we steward that appropriately and provide more public school options to more New Mexicans, but do it in a way where quality is upheld.”

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. 

Three-quarters of New Mexicans support the expansion

News

An overwhelming percentage of New Mexicans believe students suffered learning loss during the Covid-19 pandemic, and two-thirds lack confidence that the state or school districts are doing enough to make up that lost ground.

Those are among the findings from a new poll commissioned by a consortium of education advocacy groups and conducted by Research & Polling Inc., an Albuquerque-based polling firm.

Asked whether they felt students suffered learning loss during the pandemic, 88 percent of respondents answered yes. And 63 percent responded that they aren’t confident that the Public Education Department and school districts “have a plan to get students back on track.”

And only 19 percent of respondents gave state education officials high marks for their handling of the Covid-19 pandemic, while half said the state has done a poor job.

On the questions of pandemic learning loss and state and district plans for overcoming it, there were minor variations in responses based on gender, socioeconomic status, race, ethnicity, and geographic location.

Slightly fewer women (85 percent) than men (90 percent) felt that learning loss occurred, and fewer Hispanics (84 percent) than whites (93 percent) said students lost ground. Some 82 percent of the lowest income households surveyed – those earning under $20,000 per year– believed learning loss occurred, while 91 percent of people in households with incomes of $100,000 cited learning loss as significant.

Geographically, respondents in northwest New Mexico were most likely (91 percent) to identify learning loss as real, while those in the north-central region were least likely (83 percent).

Opinions about education officials’ handling of pandemic recovery broke down along similar lines. 

Those numbers seem about right to Tennise Lucas, a New Mexico educator for more than 25 years who is currently the college and career director at Mission Achievement and Success (MAS) charter school in Albuquerque.

From her perspective, Lucas said, the pandemic took a huge toll on kids both academically and emotionally, and recovery will take a concerted and deliberate effort that few schools and districts seem willing or able to undertake.

“Nobody expected (the pandemic) and so unfortunately, when it happened, everyone was scrambling for technology, for internet service, for a lot of things,” Lucas said. “And high risk populations suffered most because they just don’t have the resources in their homes.” This was especially true in tribal areas, she said, that often lack reliable internet access that’s a necessary precondition for remote learning.

Learning loss was also especially acute for students who aren’t safe at home, because being trapped in an unsafe environment makes learning impossible, Lucas said. “They could have been at home with their abuser or they could have been at home with somebody who didn’t like them. They were babysitting their siblings. You have such a wide range of things that you have to look at. A lot of times people don’t realize how social-emotional wellbeing and academics go together.”

At MAS, Lucas said, leadership and staff have made a concerted effort ameliorate the impacts of Covid-19 learning loss. There are coaches at every grade level, people who check on every absent student every day (attendance has been a big problem everywhere post-covid), and a series of social-emotional supports.

But Lucas expressed dismay at what she has seen and heard about what other schools and districts are doing – or not doing – to surmount these challenges. “Some districts and systems just aren’t spending their (Covid relief) money like they should, in attendance coaches, social workers, places where people can have an actual impact.

“Maybe don’t give superintendents big raises when their districts aren’t performing.”

Ashley Carpenter, the mother of four school-age children who attend both district and charter schools in Albuquerque and Santa Fe, said the pandemic had a devastating impact on her children’s education and emotional wellbeing. In some cases, she said, schools are doing a good job trying to patch things up. But in others, school efforts leave much to be desired.

Her two older boys, now 11 and 14, were hit especially hard by having their in-person learning disrupted, Carpenter said. “They didn’t have that kind of connection and that instruction that they needed,” she said. “They are both very extroverted so they need that contact. Even if they got one-on-one time with a teacher, it was a struggle to get them to grasp the concepts they needed to get and would have gotten if they had been able to work in person.”

Her oldest son, now a freshman at an Albuquerque high school, struggles to interact with peers now that school is back in person, even though that was never an issue for him prior to the pandemic, Carpenter said. But she credited the school with having supports in place to support struggling students.

“They are doing a good job trying to get kids reintegrated,” she said.

Her two youngest children, who attend the Albuquerque Sign Language Academy charter school, are doing well, thanks, she said, to the “amazing” supports the school has in place. “They have a lot of therapists and other experts on board to help with the social emotional aspect,” she said.

Pollsters conducted 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.

New Mexico Education will be reporting on other poll findings in the coming days and weeks.

An overwhelming percentage of New Mexicans believe

News

The first state test results in three years show that many Albuquerque Public Schools students emerged from Covid-19 learning disruptions facing a long climb toward grade-level proficiency.

During a lengthy presentation and question and answer session with school board members Sept. 14, APS officials acknowledged the challenges, but also expressed confidence that some new cabinet members and new learning materials will help change the district’s trajectory.

Scores also revealed enormous racial and socioeconomic achievement gaps, with more affluent students as well as Asian and white students scoring significantly higher on literacy and math assessments than low-income students and students of color.

A slide deck presented by senior district officials laid out the data clearly and left little room for misinterpretation. On the new test for students in grades 3-8, the New Mexico Measures of Student Success and Achievement (NM-MSSA), 60 percent of Asian and white students scored at grade level or better on English Language Arts tests, while 19 percent of native American and 29 percent of Hispanic students met that standard.

“It’s (sobering) to actually see these scores,” board member Crystal Tapia-Rommero said. “I’ve heard some of you say these last couple of weeks, that  you can’t measure a student completely on test scores, that they don’t measure creativity and if they’re innovative, and I get that, I fully get that. But looking (at these scores) I’m sad. I’m just really, really sad.”

Superintendent Scott Elder, while agreeing the scores left much to be desired, also said no one should be surprised that the first post-pandemic test results were disappointing. “We have a long history of struggling (in) the district and there’s no denying that,” Elder said. “(The pandemic) was a historically unknown situation. Our educators were dealt some tremendously difficult situations. We spent a year online and everyone across the country has been saying that when the first round of scores come out, they’re not going to be very good.”

Despite all that, Elder said “In some ways, I was surprised that some of them were as good as they were, because of all the doom and gloom.”

Elder reiterated the messaging from the New Mexico Public Education Department that scores this year cannot be compared to years past, because the tests are new and not aligned with the PARCC assessments used previously. This year’s scores should be viewed as baseline data, he emphasized.

Tapia-Romero stressed that APS’ struggles predate the pandemic, and said she hopes the district and the community at large will take this opportunity to have tough conversations. “We (the school board) are going to partner with you and support you as much as we can to make sure that we can do for our teachers and for our students,” she said. “But these (results) bring to light some issues that we really haven’t addressed or acknowledged, or been very honest about in a while.”

APS is transparent with its data, offering a robust set of tools online that allow families to view data down to the school level and disaggregated by gender, race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and geography. Using the searchable tool for NM-MSSA, it’s possible to see stark differences in student test score results from one section of the city to the other.

In the lower-income Learning Zone 2 in the city’s southwestern quadrant, for example, no grade level 3-8 had more than one-quarter of its students score proficient in English Language Arts or even 15 percent of students proficient in math.

In the more affluent Learning Zone 4 in the northeast quadrant, proficiency hovered near 50 percent in ELA at all grade levels, and between 34 and 45 percent in math. Those aren’t great numbers, but the contrast between zones 2 and 4 are notable.

It’s notable that low-income students in the more affluent Zone 4 schools did far better on the tests than their peers in Zone 2. Almost one-third of Zone 4 students who qualified for federally subsidized lunches scored proficient in ELA, and 21 percent were proficient in math. In Zone 2 however, just 20 percent of students were proficient in ELA and 11 percent in math.

Board President Yolanda Montoya-Cordova said APS has suffered in recent years from “not having strong tools, resources, or a strong math instructional piece or framework to follow.” New curriculum and some new people in senior leadership positions could make a big difference, she said.

One of the newcomers is Channell Segura, the former superintendent in Truth or Consequences who joined APS this summer as chief of schools. She told board members that she will be focusing much of her attention on three issues: attendance, achievement, and attainment (on-time graduation).

She said attendance is vitally important and she will require every school to develop an attendance plan. By achievement, she said, she means “our teachers are teaching grade-level standards and utilizing high-yield strategies so that students from all subgroups can access those standards.” 

Scores also revealed enormous racial and socioeconomic

Quick Hits

The New Mexico Public Education Department issued the following press release recently;

SANTA FE — Three New Mexico schools will be honored in the 2022 National Blue Ribbon Schools Program, which recognizes schools for overall academic performance and progress in closing student achievement gaps.

Acequia Madre Elementary in Santa Fe
Albuquerque School of Excellence in Albuquerque
Texico Middle School in Texico
The Blue Ribbon School designation, conferred annually by the U.S. Department of Education, celebrates public and private schools for overall academic excellence or progress closing achievement gaps. New Mexico’s Blue Ribbon Schools are among 297 schools selected nationally this year.

“New Mexico’s Blue Ribbon Schools inspire young minds to excel, maintain high standards, and support all students. This is a prestigious award received by a few schools across the country.” Public Education Secretary Kurt Steinhaus said. “Every New Mexican should take pride in these schools and the extraordinary work they are doing to close achievement gaps, create positive learning environments and set children on the path to academic success.”

Acequia Madre Elementary Principal Dr. Dietger De Maeseneer said he was proud the school received the honor despite challenges brought about by the pandemic.

“Coming out of a global pandemic with a Blue Ribbon award is incredible,” De Maeseneer said. It serves as a testimony to the excellence we are committed to at Acequia Madre even during the most challenging of times. Together we stand tall!”

Albuquerque School of Excellence Principal Mustafa Ayik credits the school’s success to the high bar set for students and staff.

“We are tremendously proud of our campus’s effort each day to instill a culture of high expectations in our school,” Ayik said. “This elite designation endorses how our students approach and overcome challenges, how staff members work together as a team, and how our entire ABQ School of Excellence community collaborates to create the best school environment possible for our students.”

Texico Middle School Principal Dee Rae Timberlake attributes the Blue Ribbon designation to the extensive work of the school’s educators.”

“Our success is credited to our amazing educators and staff at Texico. Mediocrity is not in their vocabulary and that mindset has transferred to our students in our classrooms,” Timberlake said. “This recognition is exciting for our entire district and community.”

New Mexico’s three Blue Ribbon School award recipients will receive awards at a ceremony this November in Washington D.C.

The New Mexico Public Education Department issued

Quick Hits

Wildfires and chronic absenteeism caused fewer than the federally mandated 95% of New Mexico public school students to take state tests last spring.

An article in the Albuquerque Journal reported that 92 percent of students took state math and language arts tests. In 2019, the last year tests were administered before the two-year Covid-19 disruption, 94 percent of students took reading assessments and 94 percent took the math tests.

A Public Education Department spokeswoman told the Journal that district superintendents and charter school leaders will receive letters from the department informing them that they fell below the federal participation threshold.

PED will also publicly report participation numbers for individual districts and schools.

Test results released earlier this month showed that New Mexico students continue to struggle. Only a third of third through eighth graders and 11th graders were proficient in language arts. And only about one-quarter were proficient in math.

Wildfires and chronic absenteeism caused fewer than

Quick Hits

Bibb Hubbard founded a nonprofit organization called Learning Heroes to help parents most effectively advocate on behalf of their children’s educational success and to help them with learning at home. The organization conducts extensive parent and educator research and supports parents and guardians as their child’s most effective education advocates. 

Hubbard recently wrote an op-ed column for The Hill newspaper, in which she made a strong case for parents playing a central role in their children’s recovery from Covid-era learning loss.

Her column also makes a strong case for helping parents locate and pay for high-impact tutoring, which research has shown is an effective intervention.

“Organizations like Saga have data showing that when their programs are properly implemented, they can achieve up to 2.5 years of additional math learning in one year, close the achievement gap between high- and low-income students by 50 percent and reduce math course failure by 63 percent.,” Hubbard wrote in The Hill.

But parents also need to understand the likelihood that their children need additional help. In May of this year, Hubbard wrote, a survey showed that 92 percent of parents believed that their children were performing at or above grade level in reading and math. The truth, according to recent National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) scores, is far bleaker. Reading and math scores among nine-year-olds took their biggest drops in decades this year.

Please head over to The Hill to read the full article. It is well worth your time.

Bibb Hubbard founded a nonprofit organization called Learning

News

Editor’s note: Altura Preparatory Charter school, a K-5,Title I school in Albuquerque, was one of three schools recently honored by Teach Plus New Mexico for its innovative practices. Teach Plus lauded the school for “assigning content specialist teachers for all grades K-4, giving each student access to subject-focused instruction, differentiation, and intervention. Teachers are given more time to thoroughly teach their subject area, providing students with a learning environment where each subject is taught with fidelity and dedication to student mastery. New Mexico Education recently interviewed Altura founders and co-directors Lissa Hines and Meaghan Hindman about the school and their approach to elementary education. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

New Mexico Education: Please tell us a bit about your backgrounds and how you came to found Altura Preparatory.

Lissa Hines:  I started my teaching career in 1995 here in Albuquerque. We moved to the Bay Area in 2005, and I became an assistant principal in Oakland Unified School District. After two years, I went to a charter school, and then back to Oakland Unified. Then we moved back to Albuquerque, and went back to the school where I had left in 2005.

I was super discouraged by what I saw. My girls had attended my school in Oakland, a California Distinguished School and National Blue Ribbon School. Going from there to what was considered an A-rated school here in New Mexico was a bit of a shock. My daughter was doing things that she had already done in fourth grade as a fifth-grader. And I was really disillusioned with the education my second-grader was getting as well.

I met Scott Hindman (executive director of  Excellent Schools New Mexico) and he introduced me to his then-fiance Meaghan. We talked a lot about the educational field but didn’t immediately commit to anything. Then, two months later, after I went out to Oakland to get the Blue Ribbon award, we decided, let’s do this. Let’s start a school. Albuquerque Public Schools, with 90,000 kids, didn’t have a single Blue Ribbon school that year.

Meaghan Hindman: I grew up here in Albuquerque, and then left for college and became a teacher in the Bay Area. I went back to school, got a Master’s Degree, then worked at a single-site charter school in San Jose that was doing some really new and different things.

I moved to Memphis for a year and worked as an assistant principal at a turnaround middle school before moving back here in the summer of 2016 when Scott founded Excellent Schools New Mexico. Turnaround work was really hard so I needed a couple of months to figure out what I wanted to do next. And then I met Lissa.

We decided we could do something really different here. So in 2016 we started planning and wrote our charter application that next spring. We were able to get New Schools Venture Fund funding for startup, which was huge. I think we’re the first school here in New Mexico to get that.

Our charter was approved unanimously and we spent the 2017-18 year planning, recruiting students, doing all of that stuff I would never want to do again. We opened in September of 2018 with 60 kids in kindergarten through second grade. We added a grade every year through fifth grade. So last year was our first year where we had graduating fifth graders.

NME: How did you come up with the model for Altura Preparatory?

Hines: Back in the Bay Area we both were exposed to Rocketship Public Schools (a network of high-performing charter elementary schools in underserved communities) and loved what they were doing. I used to take my teachers every year to see Rocketship. And we developed that content specialists model in OUSD. It was amazing that we were able to do that because they were a very unionized district. Teachers loved it. 

So when we sat down in the middle of Thanksgiving break and asked ourselves, what do we want our school to look like? One of the first things we talked about was what we had seen at different high performing charter management organizations that we wanted to replicate, because we weren’t trying to reinvent the wheel.There are so many people out there doing amazing things that don’t get the press for it.

No one had heard of content specialists in elementary school out here in New Mexico. And our thinking was, if we are trying to retain teachers, instead of having them be jack of all trades, having to do so many things K-5 and then leave the profession because it is overwhelming. What if we had them specialize? We wanted a model that would be doable for teachers, that wouldn’t cause the burnout that I think we’ve both seen with both young teachers and older teachers.

This allows them to develop as a teacher and hone in on an area that they love and just become an expert in teaching that particular subject.

NME: Do you have elementary school kids moving from room to room for different subjects, or do the teachers move?

Hindman: The kids move. But it doesn’t look like a middle school passing period, with kids just everywhere. They line up, they walk together and they have a routine for changing classes. They also change for electives. All kids get chess, art, PE, and Lego engineering.

Hines: It’s so funny because when people first hear about this, even some of the people that we’ve recruited they’re like, “Oh, is that developmentally appropriate for kids?” Oh my gosh, it’s totally fine. The kids love it. I always talk about the fact that I have ADHD and for me as a kid all that movement would have been great.

Another important point is you have three different core academic teachers you’re working with, and if you think about kids getting pigeonholed in kindergarten or first grade because a particular teacher might not know how to relate to them well, and they’re not the best experience scholastically in kindergarten. Well when you’ve got three people you’re rotating through, during the day, that’s three different people that are looking at you in different ways and they are going to find a way to work with you to meet your needs.

At Altura Preparatory, teachers are given more

News

Republican gubernatorial candidate Mark Ronchetti’s education plan mixes some proposals typically appealing to Republicans with initiatives that echo ideas that in the past held appeal on both sides of the political aisle.

That hasn’t kept predictable interest groups from warning that should he be elected, Ronchetti will spell doom for New Mexico’s public education system. Those groups are closely aligned with incumbent Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham, who is locked in a competitive election battle with Ronchetti.

Much of their ire has been focused on a modest proposal to provide low-income parents of students in grades 1-3 with $1,500 stipends for three years for “purchase outside-the-classroom support for their child” to help catch their kids up in subjects where pandemic disruptions caused them to fall farther behind.

Predictably, union leaders and others warned that this would be a backdoor effort to impose school vouchers on New Mexico, even though private school choice is mentioned nowhere in Ronchetti’s plan.

Other proposals could spur meaningful change to the state’s languishing public education system, but garnered less attention. Among them:

  • “​​Require school districts to spend their COVID-relief funds on classroom learning interventions, directed at helping those who have fallen furthest behind, as opposed to capital projects or other programs not centered on learning.” Currently, the state requires little accountability for how federal relief funds are being spent by districts.
  • Change state law to limit the growth of administrative spending in education, directing the lion’s share of new education dollars into classrooms – including additional instructional coaches, teacher leaders, academic resources, and interventions for struggling students. This kind of focus on classrooms and educators has in the past held appeal nationally for some Democrats and Republicans alike.
  • Ensuring that early-grade teachers receive annual training on scientifically proven reading strategies – building off an initiative of the Public Education Department to provide training on the science of reading for all PreK-3 teachers.
  • Boosting pay for successful principals and creating a program where they mentor aspiring principals for a year or two. This, too, would seem to be a proposal that could hold appeal for Democrats as well as Republicans.
  • “Expand trade and vocational schools, and better align our high school and community college course offerings with the workforce shortage areas and industry growth target areas in New Mexico.”

Ronchetti also signaled support for charter and magnet schools, saying parents need a more robust array of public school choices to meet their children’s needs.

Some of Ronchetti’s proposals appear aimed at the more conservative wing of the Republican Party. Most notable among these is a statement that parents should “know and have access to course materials, curriculum and books.” 

This appears to be an indirect reference to controversies across the nation over the past year about the alleged teaching of Critical Race Theory in schools, and furious parental backlash often sparked by right-wing media disinformation.

This section of the plan also calls for parents to receive information at multiple points during the school year about whether their children are learning at grade level, and if they are not, what options and interventions “are available to get them back on track.”

One reason New Mexico ranks 50th in the nation in educational outcomes is that too many people believe that some children cannot learn at high levels, Ronchetti writes in the plan. 

“For too long, we’ve excused poor performance,” the plan’s introduction says. Why? Too many have allowed themselves to believe the lie that a child’s destiny—in the classroom, and thus in life—is determined and set by their demographics… by where they live, what their parents earn, and what the color of their skin is.

“​​We need to completely rethink how we approach education in New Mexico so that every child is allowed and encouraged to reach their full potential.”

Republican gubernatorial candidate Mark Ronchetti’s education plan

News

New Mexico public school students continue to struggle with learning, state test results released Thursday show, but whether that is attributable to the Covid-19 pandemic is difficult to assess because new tests launched this year aren’t comparable to pre-Covid state exams.

Only about one-third of the state’s students scored proficient in language arts, and a quarter in math on tests administered last spring. 

Statewide data released by the Public Education Department show that the state’s most vulnerable students  – kids of color and those from low-income families – are facing learning challenges above and beyond what the troubling overall state results suggest.

New Mexico’s test results release came on the same day that the federal government released National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) test results of nine-year-olds, showing unprecedented drops in literacy and math scores across the country.

State Education Secretary Kurt Steinhaus said during a press briefing that the state and national results share a finding that points to an enormous challenge. 

“It’s really important to point out that in the NAEP assessment released today, and also in New Mexico, the students who are most in need of help are the ones that were more highly affected by Covid and being away (from school),” Steinhaus said, adding that the state has developed a suite of strategies to attack the problem.

New Mexico’s new Measures of Student Success and Achievement (MSSA), administered to students in grades 3-8, show that low-income students – those eligible for federally subsidized school meals – 74 percent of the state’s students – struggle mightily. Just 24 percent of low-income third-grade students are proficient in language arts, and 16 percent in math.

Hispanic students, who comprise 63 percent of New Mexico students, also continue to lag behind the already low state averages. Just 27 percent of third-grade Hispanic students are proficient in language arts, and 18 percent in math. 

And Native Americans, the third largest student sub-group, are the most poorly served of any group. Just 14 percent of Native American third-graders were proficient in language arts, and 12 percent in math.

“Through my performance lens these results don’t pass muster and we don’t pretend that they do,” said Matthew Goodlaw, PED’s director of research, evaluation, and accountability. “We hold ourselves accountable to the students and their families. And we’ll work with our local school systems to identify and target schools, specific supports throughout the state, transparently reporting results so that all stakeholders can partner with their neighborhood or public charter schools.”

PED officials stressed early in their presentation that it isn’t possible to compare MSSA results to the previous set of state tests, which were developed by a national consortium known as PARCC (Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers).

The new tests are linked to a state assessment system that does more than administer a test late in the year, which doesn’t help teachers tailor instruction to student needs, said Lynn Vásquez, PED’s division director of assessment and learning management systems.

This system “provides classroom and district level assessment resources that can be leveraged as learning occurs within the instructional year,” Vásquez said.

Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham, at the beginning of her term, ordered the state to leave PARCC and develop its own tests. Through a long process, state educators developed the MSSA, which was administered for the first time last spring.

End-of-year state exams are required by the U.S. Department of Education, but each state is responsible for developing its own testing regimen. The federal government requires that states test 95 percent or more of its students.

PED officials said Thursday that New Mexico fell slightly short of that number, but they said they didn’t yet have a precise figure. Well chronicled high absenteeism among middle and high school students across the state contributed to missing the goal, they said.

Other notable statewide data points include:

  • 31 percent of New Mexico students were proficient in early literacy (kindergarten through second grade as measured by the iStation assessment)
  • 34 percent of students were proficient in language arts (tested in grades 3-8 and 11)
  • 25 percent were proficient in math (same tested grades as language arts)
  • 33 percent were proficient in science (tested in grades 5,8, and 11)
  • Fifth-graders had the highest proficiency of any grade in language arts (36 percent), and third-graders had the lowest (32 percent)
  • Just 16 percent of 11th-graders were proficient in math
  • Female students had higher proficiency rates than males in language arts at every grade level.  But males out-performed females at every grade in math.
  • English learners and students with disabilities were among the lowest performers in every subject and grade level.

View a slide deck prepared for the media by PED here.

New Mexico public school students continue to