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Two of New Mexico’s 10 largest public school districts – Albuquerque and Santa Fe –  have reported significant increases in graduation rates since the Covid-19 pandemic began two years ago.

Given the pervasive evidence about learning loss and the devastating impact on students of the social isolation the pandemic caused, these numbers raise more questions than they answer.

According to data compiled by New Mexico Education, Santa Fe schools saw a 7 percent increase in graduation rates between 2019 – the last pre-Covid year – and 2021. In 2019, the SFPS graduation rate was 78.1 percent, and in 2021 it was 83.8 percent.

Albuquerque Public Schools’ graduation rate increased by 8 percent from 2019 and 2021. In 2019, the APS graduation rate was 74.1 percent, and in 2021 it was 75.7 percent.

Six of the other eight largest districts saw moderate dips in graduation rates post-Covid. The two exceptions were Roswell, which reported a larger 9 percent drop, and Los Lunas, which reported a 1 percent increase.

Under federal regulations, the on-time “adjusted cohort graduation rate” is calculated by dividing the number of students graduating by the number entering ninth grade four years earlier. New Mexico is unusual among states in that it uses a “shared accountability” model. This means, according to the PED, that any high school a student attends is assigned a portion of that student’s ‘outcome,’ whether that is graduation in four or more years, or dropping out before graduation.

The Brookings Institution, a centrist think-tank, in writing about national increases in graduation rates even before the pandemic, said such claims should be viewed with some skepticism.

“Social scientists know that when it comes to numbers and accountability, Campbell’s Law needs to be kept in mind: “The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor,”” Brookings wrote in a 2018 report.

“Campbell’s Law is cited regularly in discussions of achievement-test scores, but high schools are accountable for their on-time graduation rate, so the law would apply to it,” the report continues.

Still, districts and the state’s Public Education Department were quick to trumpet the figures as good news coming out of the pandemic. “It’s reassuring that even amid the pandemic’s second year, New Mexico’s overall graduation rate held steady, with many groups seeing improvement,” Public Education Secretary Kurt Steinhaus said in a press release. “We’re grateful to students, families and educators for the hard work it took to achieve that.”

Albuquerque Public Schools released a video earlier this month highlighting its graduation rate successes featuring interviews with Superintendent Scott Elder and several high school principals. In the video, Elder attributed improved rates to “efforts of the people at the schools.”

“…families are buying in and they’re saying, “No, I want my kid to graduate.” They recognize that it makes a difference in their future life and it’s just so important. I’m really pleased to get here and I hope we continue to improve,” Elder said.

Del Norte High School Principal Ed Bortot said his school has created a personalized, caring culture. “It’s about creating positive relationships and knowing that you’re not just a number on this campus,” Bortot said in the video. “We know you. We know who you are when we bring you in. We care about you. It’s about a belief system. It’s about telling our kids, number one, “We believe in you. We know you can do this.”

Remediation rates are not mentioned in the four-plus-minute video.

New Mexico makes it difficult to put graduation rates in perspective, because the state does a poor job of collecting and reporting data on how many high school graduates enter college in need of remedial classes because they aren’t prepared for the rigors of college-level work.

The New Mexico Higher Education Department’s website provides a remediation percentage for each year’s graduating class. But the website has not been updated since 2020, and provides just a one-sentence explanation and no underlying data, making any meaningful analysis impossible.

The most recent remediation rate listed on the site, from the fall of 2000 was 25.33 percent.

Graduation rates decoupled from remediation rates provide an incomplete picture. Theoretically, a school district could decide in the wake of the pandemic to graduate most students, regardless of their grades, because learning was severely disrupted and students shouldn’t be punished for circumstances beyond their control. That would show up as a higher graduation rate.

This kind of manipulation would be captured, at least for students entering community colleges or four-year colleges, by a corresponding rise in remediation rates – the percentage of students required to take non-credit bearing classes to get them to the academic level of an incoming freshman. But the state’s remediation rate information is both out-of-date and woefully lacking in detail.

In some states, students must pay for remedial classes but get no college credit for them. This can be discouraging, especially for low-income students for whom the unanticipated expense is especially burdensome.

In New Mexico, however, most remedial classes are credit-bearing, according to the Higher Education Department, and are covered by the state’s Opportunity and Lottery Scholarships, which provide full college tuition funding to many of the state’s college students.

Two of New Mexico’s 10 largest public

News

News analysis

After toughening high school graduation requirements in the late days of the Martinez administration, New Mexico is taking preliminary steps toward loosening requirements as soon as next year.

During a recent meeting of the Legislative Education Study Committee (LESC), Public Education Department officials laid out the new, more lax requirements they are preparing for consideration during the 2023 legislative session.

PED Director of College and Career Readiness, Elaine Perea, framed the proposed changes as focused more on demonstrations of competency and less on test score results. “We want as a community to ensure that people have competency. We’re not talking about removing the idea of demonstrating competency, but rather recognizing that demonstrating competency happens in so many different ways,” she said.  

“Trying to put that all into a checklist of the things that count as competent is missing perhaps the spirit of what the law was trying to get at, which was that students be competent in something. It’s okay if not everybody’s competent in Algebra Two.”

PED would like to decentralize the determination of competency, and turn much of that authority back to school districts. While local control is a broadly popular concept, in this case it runs the risk of lowering the bar in some places while perhaps raising it in others.

This raises questions about what receiving a high school diploma means in terms of what any given student knows and is capable of doing. There could potentially be enormous variability from one district to another. 

It also raises a real risk of creating a “soft bigotry of low expectations,” in which students who come to school carrying more challenges are held to a lower standard than others.

Still, members of the LESC expressed enthusiasm for the draft proposal, detailed in a hearing brief, precisely because it does let different communities set the graduation bar at different heights.

“It puts a lot more responsibility on communities with large numbers of minority students or people of color to put in their own requirements and recommendations,” said State Senator Wilam P. Soules, a Las Cruces Democrat and LESC chair. Soules works as a teacher in the Las Cruces School District.

“I’m very much in favor of reducing our responsibility for specifics and keeping them broad and moving the responsibility to school boards and superintendents for setting up the community expectations,” Soules said.

This approach carries a number of clear risks. Foremost among them is that some districts will graduate large numbers of students who are neither college nor career ready. That is what education leaders in the administration of Governor Susana Martinez were trying to remedy when they adopted more stringent graduation requirements in the summer of 2018.

The Martinez administration requirements technically remain in place but have been stalled by the state testing moratorium put in place during the Covid-19 pandemic. Testing only resumed this past spring after a two-year hiatus.

The PED sent a memo to superintendents and charter school leaders last January updating demonstration of competency and testing requirements.

Under the Martinez graduation requirements, students had to demonstrate competency in mathematics, reading, language arts, writing, science, and social studies Including sections on the U.S. and New Mexico constitutions), by meeting coursework requirements, and scoring above a certain level on state assessments.

Students who did not achieve high enough scores then had the option of demonstrating competency through other means. But rather than leaving these to districts to determine, the state laid them out.

The reason the Martinez-era PED mandated specific alternative demonstrations of competency is that prior to her administration, districts had significant leeway in determining how to demonstrate competency.

Some districts used outdated assessments, college acceptance letters (including those from colleges that enrolled anyone who applied), group work, or non-standardized classroom assessments.

The Martinez regulations required alternative demonstrations of competency to include PED-approved alternative assessments, and competency-based alternatives including industry-recognized certificates, programs of study, dual credit classes, and standards-based portfolios.

The proposed new regulation removes the requirement for standardized assessments to act as a first-line demonstration of competency. Alternative demonstrations of competency could be used in place of tests from the outset. 

One challenge with returning the determination of alternative demonstrations of competency to local districts is that some students might think they are on track to gain admittance to a selective college only to learn, too late, that they aren’t academically prepared.

This problem is exacerbated by the fact that high school counselors, particularly in larger high schools, have enormous caseloads and cannot give every student the attention he or she might need.

Perea acknowledged this challenge during the hearing. “My hope is that we actually take some of the burden off of counselors and make it clear for families that you have to have four units of math, for example, if you want to attend (the University of New Mexico).”

But it wasn’t clear from the hearing or in the proposed regulations exactly how PED would make that happen.

Conversations about graduation requirements will continue throughout the interim between legislative sessions. The legislature could be asked to approve new guidelines during its 2023 session.

This raises questions about what receiving a

News

Daniyal Hussain, a Cottonwood Classical Preparatory School rising 11th-grader has won a spot in a prestigious training program for young policy leaders interested in focusing on improving their school communities.

Daniyal was one of 10 students from across the country selected from a group of 100 applicants for the inaugural class of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools’ Rising Leaders Initiative.

Under the year-long program, Daniyal will receive training from experts in civic participation, education advocacy, leadership development, and public speaking.

Daniyal developed an interest in improving public education for everyone after moving from Minnesota to Albuquerque as a second-grader and enrolling in a school that did not serve him well.

“My parents put me in this little Montessori school and we thought it was a great elementary school,” Daniyal recalled in an interview. “But then we slowly realized, as I progressed from third through fifth grade, that it definitely was not giving me what I needed and had some substandard educational levels.”

Daniyal moved to Cottonwood Classical, one of New Mexico’s top public charter schools, in sixth grade, and quickly discovered how far behind his peers he was academically.

“At first I was struggling in basic subjects such as math and English, and I really had to catch up,” Daniyal said. “Through the help of my family and the staff at Cottonwood Classical, I was able to catch up and now succeed.”

During his time at Cottonwood Classical, Daniyal has developed a passion for STEM (Science, technology, Engineering, and Math) education, and specifically robotics. He is a member of the school’s five-member robotics team, and has traveled around the country to take part in international robotics competitions.

Daniyal aspires to transfer his passion for STEM to some of his classmates, using skills he will develop through the Rising Leaders program. “I just want to encourage everyone to be creative with their future plans,” he said.

As for his future, Daniyal plans to attend a four-year college or university. He is attending a summer health careers program, and is considering studying medicine. “Surgery is really interesting to me,” he said.

Daniyal credited Cottonwood Classical and its International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme for fueling his passion for learning. “IB has played a big role in preparing me for college and making sure that I have the skills ready to be able to enter college and not lag behind,” he said. 

Nina Rees, CEO and President, National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, said the 10 students selected for the program have already been difference-makers. 

“These young leaders are the reason we do this work,” she said. “In less than 20 years of life, they’ve already made waves through their community. We are incredibly excited to connect with them, teach them, and learn from them,” says Rees. “We can’t wait to see the change they will create in the decades to come.”

Participants will have the opportunity to apply what they’ve learned by launching an advocacy club in their school to help address education issues their community is facing. Rising Leaders are committed to civic action, community engagement, and access to a high-quality and free public education.

Daniyal Hussain, a Cottonwood Classical Preparatory School

Commentary

Editor’s note: This article was written by Kyra Nieto. She is the parent of two children who attend Chaparral Elementary (Albuquerque Public Schools) and was a participant of the Parents Together Fellowship.

Why is Albuquerque Public Schools alone among major school districts in the region, and across the country, in refusing to provide readily available, archived video of its school board meetings to the public?

As a parent of an APS student, I occasionally want to watch a meeting to see how or why a particular decision was made. But unless I can rearrange my schedule to tune into the meeting live, I, like thousands of other parents, am out of luck.

The district’s unwillingness to make it easy for the taxpaying public to monitor its activities is a slap in the face to all of us.

If you reach out and ask, the APS communications office will send a link to the archived video of any meeting. While that might seem like a reasonable solution, the district does not advertise this fact anywhere, so the vast majority of parents and residents will never know about it. 

The reason APS offers for the lack of archives is that real-time captions/subtitles intended to accommodate people with hearing challenges, are riddled with inaccuracies.

Rather than post those videos with imperfect captions, APS chooses not to post them at all. That makes no sense.

I spent a couple of hours visiting school district websites to confirm that APS is an outlier when it comes to transparency. That is indeed the case.

Don’t take my word for it. Here’s a cheat sheet:

Peoria Unified (Phoenix): https://www.peoriaunified.org/Page/122

Mesa Unified (Phoenix) https://www.mpsaz.org/community/govboard/meetings/

Dallas Unified: https://www.dallasisd.org/domain/8679

Oklahoma City: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCcyRYC8sjI0VI0cilAOvZ_g/videos

Chicago: https://www.cpsboe.org/meetings/past-meetings

New York City: https://learndoe.org/pep/category/webinar-recordings/

Los Angeles: http://laschoolboard.org/event/select

Santa Fe: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCv_RRgkZ4kjfSSI1sGrqKFw

Rio Rancho: – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rieCeOMMi2U&list=PLRQ7x4mZ0Zm6bjHyc8AqnyDpUeNdKWpBQ

The videos are easier to find in some cases than in others. But they’re all there for viewing.

Increasingly, our nation is suffering from a loss of trust in public institutions. The kind of behavior displayed by APS on this issue can only make  that problem worse..

As an active and engaged Albuquerque parent, I implore APS to stop depriving its public of vital information.

Cam was barely a teenager when he

News

Editor’s note: In mid-July, Las Cruces Public Schools will implement what is known as a balanced calendar, lengthening the school year by 10 days, shortening the summer break to six weeks to minimize learning loss, and adding longer breaks spaced throughout the school year. 

New Mexico Education interviewed Las Cruces Superintendent Ralph Ramos about the calendar changes. Ramos has worked in the district for 29 years, as a teacher, assistant principal, middle school principal, and for the past 18 months, superintendent. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

New Mexico Education: Superintendent Ramos, can you please tell us about how the district decided to go to this balanced calendar?

Ralph Ramos: Last year, just as I was starting as interim superintendent, our calendar was presented. I had not reviewed the calendar. I had not served on any committee. I questioned the process of how we came up with a calendar. And it got declined by the board. This extended year and balanced calendar was one of the options that had been presented.

I thought this calendar was a great idea. It’s better for students, and the more frequent breaks help with staff burnout, especially after all the challenges the Covid pandemic caused.

So I said ‘timeout, let’s rethink how we go about this.” Instead of starting the calendar committee work in January and ending in April, let’s back way up, start it in September and have a much broader group of stakeholders involved. We need to be truly listening to people. We developed a few options, including the more traditional calendar, then took it to our District Advisory Council before going to the board.

I know as a middle school principal, this was the kind of calendar we had always wanted. Throughout the southwest, in El Paso and places in Arizona, they’ve been using this new, balanced calendar. So I wanted us to take a close look at it. The new calendar committee also looked at adding 10 days to our calendar. I really wanted to make that happen. By rejecting the Extended Learning Time Program last year, we lost, gosh, probably $13 million we could have gotten from the state.

When the board passed the new calendar, including the extra days, that was a huge celebration. And we got to work right away. Everybody put our brains together to really celebrate and think through this new calendar. We’re going to be able to embed enrichment and enrich learning options with those extra 10 days in there. There’s more planning time for teachers to really focus on what they’re going to be doing. Professional development is another key thing that we’re going to be doing with this calendar. So there’s a lot of cool things, especially during our inter-sessions during the breaks.

NME: Specifically, how will this calendar look?

Ramos: The first day of school for the 2022-23 school year will be July 20. Teachers report July 14. Then it’s nine weeks, then two weeks off. Four weeks, Thanksgiving break. Four weeks, Christmas break for two weeks. Then we come back, have nine weeks, two weeks off. Another nine weeks, then a six-week summer break. Plus we still have all the national holidays to give short, extended weekend breaks.

NME: What are you hoping the calendar will do for the students and staff in Las Cruces?

Ramos: Here’s what’s different compared to what we have been doing. Up until now, our extended summer learning program has been completely voluntary. And we have had some pretty strict guidelines around it. The teachers who had the students in class throughout the school year had to teach those kids throughout the summer as well. That’s not the case anymore.

As we go into this new balanced calendar, of course, everyone is required to be in school and that’s where it’s going to make a huge difference. We’re going to also be able to provide more intervention, more social emotional support to our students, and also our staff. And all the breaks spaced out throughout the year will be helpful as well.

NME: Have you received any pushback, and if so, what have been the objections, and how have you responded?

Ramos: The main critical feedback we’ve gotten is that maybe we should have rolled it out over a year. Some people felt inconvenienced by our starting this year on July 20. Maybe they already had a vacation planned after that date, and I’m talking both students and staff. I want to thank these people for bringing that to our attention. So listening to our community, we are going to be very flexible with our students. If people already had a vacation planned, we’re not going to count those days as unexcused absences. We will be flexible with staff as well.

NME: Is there anything else people should know?

Ramos: Here is another thing we are doing for our students. We’re going to be placing 400 students, mostly high school juniors and seniors, out in the workforce throughout the summer. The state is funding this through our county. It has a great deal of flexibility built into it.

They’re also going to be able to continue working into the fall when school starts. Working after school earning money. One of our challenges has been that students, as we emerged from Covid, had picked up jobs once they were going to school online. Some of them were hard to bring back, because they were making a living. Through this state funding, we’re paying them $13.50 an hour, and they’re gaining an experience that’s an extension of the classroom as well.

We did this last year for the first time and the employers are even more excited this year. They’re asking for two or three students. It’s going great. That’s another way for our older students to spend their summer, working and learning some job skills.

NME: What kinds of jobs are students getting through this program?

Ramos: We have plumbers, electricians, roofers, a lot of the hands-on vocational but also in tech, restaurants, hospitality, tourism, you name it. Our message to employers and students alike is we have flexibility. Let’s get creative.

Las Cruces Public Schools will start school

News

Editor’s note: Mission Achievement and Success Charter School (MAS) opened in Albuquerque in 2012, led by founder JoAnn Mitchell. She had been authorized to open a school serving students in grades 6-12. But after just a couple of years, Mitchell concluded that the school needed to start working with students from their earliest years of schooling, to keep them from falling behind.

Today MAS serves more than 2,000 students in grades PreK-12, and has a lengthy waiting list. MAS stands out for having all of its students graduate high school, with 100 percent being admitted to college or the military. Its literacy and math achievement rates are far higher than Albuquerque Public Schools, the state of New Mexico as a whole, and even the suburban Rio Rancho school district. 

Mitchell’s own compelling story, and how she built MAS into the highly successful school it is today is the subject of the interview below. It has been edited for length and clarity.

New Mexico Education: Having a 100 percent graduation rate is almost unheard of, especially for a school that works with a student population facing multiple barriers.

JoAnn Mitchell: I always feel I need to throw in a disclaimer. If you look at the Public Education Department website, it shows us with a 90-something percent graduation rate. That’s because in New Mexico, we operate on a shared accountability model. That means any student who ever attended MAS counts for or against your graduation rate. So if a student came here for one semester as a freshman and then transferred and later dropped out, that student is counted against our graduation rate.

But any kid who’s come here and stayed, regardless of when they came, we have gotten them to graduate. We’re obsessive about stalking kids down. We’ll drive to their house to get them to school. We’ll go to any means possible to make sure kids are successful. And when kids do leave here (transfer to another school), we try hard to keep track of them. You can’t track every kid but we try really hard to have good conversations with families about where they are going. About 50 percent of them end up not graduating (from high school).

NME: Tell us a little about your background and how you ended up opening a charter school focused on low-income students in New Mexico.

JoAnn Mitchell

Mitchell: Until the last five to seven years I never used to share my personal story, because some of it is painful. But over time I have learned how impactful it is for people to hear it.

My parents were teen parents, high school dropouts in Upstate New York. We grew up in poverty. I mean, we were very, very poor, rural poor. It was an abusive household. I was surrounded by domestic violence and abuse. I grew up in extensive fear of my dad. It was a very dysfunctional environment. It was by the grace of God that I got where I was, and broke the cycle of poverty in my family.

I was able to attend my Catholic church’s school, and that gave me a strong academic foundation. But a lot of my academic success was based on a complete fear of my father. I developed into a perfectionist. I remember coming home over the winter break in third grade crying because I had a test coming up in January, and I had that much anxiety about whether or not I would pass the test and what would happen to me if I didn’t. 

It’s not like I was exceptionally smart. I worked my ass off. That’s really what it was. So I tell people that it’s kind of dysfunctional, how I achieved in school, it was fear. It was complete fear. But it changed the trajectory of my life.

That same fear propelled me to excelling on the New York Regents Exams, and that gave me the opportunity to go to college. Sometimes people ask me “who was your champion? Who was that person in your life who really believed in you?” I don’t want anybody to feel sorry for me, but I didn’t have that person. Nobody in my school was like, “Oh my God, you and you’re so smart. You have so much promise.” I  never heard that from a counselor or a teacher, anybody. Me leaving and going to college was literally to get out of the dysfunction.

NME: Coming from the background you just described, what was the transition to college like for you?

Mitchell: I went to Elmira College in Upstate New York. I didn’t even know the difference between a private college and a state university, but that’s where I ended up. And it was total impostor syndrome at first. All these kids driving Mercedes and new jeeps, and I didn’t even have a bicycle. I had no idea what I was doing. I wanted to be an elementary education major but I ended up registering for a lot of the wrong classes. I didn’t struggle so much academically but I really struggled with the culture of college. I didn’t know how to navigate the systems. So much of the way I have structured MAS is based on my first-hand experiences.

NME: What was your path after college?

Mitchell: I got married and my now ex-husband was a professional minor league hockey player, so we moved around a lot. I got hired into Title I (high-poverty) schools wherever we went, because there were always job openings. We lived in Florida, Georgia, New Mexico, and then back to New York. I worked in some of the poorest, most rundown schools you can imagine, especially in Columbus, Georgia.

I got fascinated with why some kids were steered into special education when I didn’t see much of a difference between them and kids who weren’t in special ed classes. It opened my eyes to the inequities around education. A lot of times special ed can be a sentence for a kid. I became fascinated by this and so I got my Master’s in school psychology.

In New Mexico I got a job as principal of the school inside the Youth Diagnostic Development Center (the juvenile detention center in Albuquerque). I loved the job. I loved working with the kids, who had just had so much trauma in their lives and made bad decisions.

I found a sweet spot for kids who have been underserved. So I worked there for a couple years, ended up getting divorced, moved to New York, and worked in a charter school in Harlem. 

That was my first experience in a charter school. It allowed me the opportunity to understand what a charter was and recognize that there might be a better way to do things. That’s what inspired the idea to open a charter. I felt that autonomy allows you to do some things that are unique. 

NME: How did you end up back in New Mexico?

Mitchell: I’ve lived and worked in several places across the country, and I learned that despite different ethnicities, kids and their needs and challenges just weren’t that different from place to place. But in New Mexico I found that the educational challenges were pretty profound. I felt like if there was ever a state that had a need for high quality education, it was New Mexico. So it was a very intentional decision to come back here. I also felt that this was a great place to live.

I was working on the charter application and flying back and forth from New York. That was 2010, 2011. I came here without a job and got a job while I was waiting to get the charter approved. So it was really a leap of faith, a complete leap of faith to try to make this happen. 

And here we are. Fast forward 10 years later, we celebrated our 10th year anniversary this year.

NME: How did you decide on the educational approach and philosophy that drives MAS?

Mitchell: Moving around as I did with my ex-husband and his hockey career, I was exposed to a lot of different schools and models. In Columbus Georgia I experienced working in a school with really dire poverty and a student population that was almost all Black. In New Mexico I learned a lot about working with second-language learners. In New York I got to visit some phenomenal charter schools.

So the philosophy of MAS was a hybrid of a lot of different experiences and a lot of my own reading and my love of learning about  what I saw work in various places. And my own experience of having grown up in situations similar to a lot of students I’ve worked with just gives me a different lens on things than a lot of other educators have.

All the parents I’ve worked with over the years love their kids, just as my parents loved me. Sometimes that doesn’t  show up in ways that we would consider socially appropriate. So I felt strongly that we needed a school that involved parents. We needed a school that pushed kids to be able to access college, regardless of where they began academically. We needed a school that provided full inclusion for kids who were identified as having special needs.

And above all, we needed a school that changed belief systems. You have to change beliefs and mindsets. That’s not pushing my values on kids. It’s changing that limited mindset, that I’m not capable, that I’m not smart, that I’m not good at school, that certain people are meant for college and it’s not for me.

A lot of times with our families it’s not that they’re not pushing their kids because they want to hold their kids back. They just don’t know what that other side of the world looks like.

It’s all about opening doors of opportunity. That involves three things. It’s academic, it’s the culture of college, and then deep, deep changes and shifts around mindset, really helping with those resiliency skills, really helping with the self advocacy, really helping with the problem solving, the perseverance, the grit.

Those things are values that if somebody doesn’t teach you, I don’t know how you develop them over the course of life unless you stumble upon them. I was lucky enough to have that happen to me, but why leave it to chance?

Mission Achievement and Success Charter School (MAS)

Quick Hits

After criticism from legislators, the New Mexico Public Education Department has accelerated its timeline for releasing state assessment results by two months.

As reported last week in New Mexico Education, members of the Legislative Finance Committee’s Education Subcommittee expressed displeasure during a May hearing that results of the Measures of Student Success and Achievement (NM-MSSA) for grades 3-8, administered in the spring would not be released until late October or early November.

But last week, PED announced that it had pressured testing vendor Cognia to accelerate its release timeline.

Cognia “began with what worked for them, and we told them that doesn’t work for us,” PED spokeswoman Judy Robinson told the Albuquerque Journal.

Testing was paused in 2020 and 2021 because of the Covid-19 pandemic, and resumed this year, with Cognia’s Measures of Student Success and Achievement (NM-MSSA) for grades 3-8 replacing PARCC. That makes this year’s results vitally important for quantifying as-yet unmeasured pandemic-related learning loss.

But this is a new test, replacing the ​​Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC), making it unclear how comparable this year’s results will be to  past years.

A 2021 LFC report estimated that the pandemic exacted a heavy toll on New Mexico’s students, and disproportionately harmed students who were already struggling in school. The report said that New Mexico’s most at-risk students, who were already at least a half-year behind in learning, lost another significant chunk of learning time because of the pandemic. That lost time ranged from 10 to 60 days, depending on the district.

Those warning signs have made policymakers eager for more reliable data.

PED also announced that results from SAT tests, taken by high school juniors, will be released this month instead of August, as originally projected. 

After criticism from legislators, the New Mexico

Quick Hits

A divided Albuquerque Public Schools board approved a $1.9 billion budget for the 2022-23 school year Wednesday, though some board members remained dissatisfied with both the budgeting process and information provided by the district administration.

Budget conversations have been complicated by the fact that enrollment in APS is declining  –from 91,000 in 2017-18 to a projected 73,000 in the upcoming year. Yet, for 2022-23 at least, the budget continued to increase, from last year’s $1.87 billion. But the district is preparing to “right-size” by cutting staff in schools and centrally.

Three school board members elected last fall – Danielle Gonzales, Courtney Jackson, and Crystal Tapia-Romero – voted against the budget, a week after delaying a vote so that Superintendent Scott Elder and his team could present the board with more detailed information on district priorities.

The Albuquerque Journal published a detailed story on the meeting this morning. 

APS walked the board through a painstakingly detailed two-hour budget presentation that nevertheless left most board members dissatisfied.

Although the budget passed on a 4-3 vote, a majority of board members said the budgeting process is flawed and needs to be improved over the next year. Budgetary decisions in some cases seemed misaligned with stated district and board priorities, they said.

“We say that we care about art, we say that we care about music, we say that we care about leadership and JROTC and choir and band. And yet those are the things that are cut, ” Gonzales said moments before voting no.

Responding to Elder’s comment that his staff had to work over the Memorial Day weekend to prepare budget materials for the board, Gonzales said that “this whole exercise was not to be mean, and was not to take away anyone’s Memorial Day weekend. I’m sorry that happened.

“The purpose of (my) questions was to know that I am voting on a budget that is a statement of our values. I still do not feel that I have the information to know that this is a budget that represents values of the APS community. I think it’s our obligation as elected officials to know that information. It’s our obligation as community leaders to know that information and to prioritize those things.”

Although she voted yes on the budget, new board member Josefina Domínguez also expressed deep reservations. “I’m very concerned about the disconnect between the narrative I’m getting tonight and the narratives that I get (in schools),” she said. “The two things that keep coming up for me is that we need a system of collaboration and a system of transparency.”

A divided Albuquerque Public Schools board approved

News

Results from state standardized tests administered this spring will not be available to school districts until late October or early November, in a year where arguably that data is more important than ever.

Senior staff of the New Mexico Public Education Department revealed the delay during a lengthy May 19 hearing of the Legislative Finance Committee’s Education Subcommittee.

The delay is for this year only, Education Secretary Kurt Steinhaus said. It results from Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham’s decision days after taking office in 2019 to switch test vendors from the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) to Cognia.

Testing was paused in 2020 and 2021 because of the Covid-19 pandemic, and resumed this year, with Cognia’s Measures of Student Success and Achievement (NM-MSSA) for grades 3-8 replacing PARCC. That makes this year’s results vitally important for quantifying as-yet unmeasured pandemic-related learning loss.

A 2021 LFC report estimated that the pandemic exacted a heavy toll on New Mexico’s students, and disproportionately harmed students who were already struggling in school. The report said that New Mexico’s most at-risk students, who were already at least a half-year behind in learning, lost another significant chunk of learning time because of the pandemic. That lost time ranged from 10 to 60 days, depending on the district.

Those warning signs have made policymakers eager for more reliable data. Members of the subcommittee expressed displeasure over the lag-time.

“I’m curious why it’s going to take us six months to get the data back, because it seems like a long time,” said State Rep. Meredith Dixon, an Albuquerque Democrat. She said the delay makes it tough for the legislature to plan for budget adjustments the test results might prompt.

Steinhaus said he shared Dixon’s frustration. “With regard to the amount of time it’s taking our contractor to get the data back to us, it’s just not acceptable,” Steinhaus said. “And when we renegotiate that contract, we’re going to have to maybe put more money in the contract so that we’re at the head of the line and New Mexico doesn’t have to wait for…other states.”

There appeared to be some confusion among PED staff over exactly when the results would be available. Steinhaus initially said August during the hearing, but staff corrected him and said November for the MSSA test.

However, a May 20 memo from PED to school districts and charter schools said preliminary online MSSA reports would be available October 3, and paper reports would be shipped to districts by October 25.

Adding further confusion, the memo says that PED will gather a group of educators between July 11 and 15 to review MSSA “student response data” to set performance-level “cut scores.” This means determining what score ranges place students in each of four categories: novice, nearing proficiency, proficient, and advanced.

PED offered no explanation for why it will take from mid-July to at least early October to tabulate the cut scores and release the data.

During the LFC hearing, Steinhaus said that readily available interim assessment data can help fill the gap while the state awaits the MSSA results, known as summative assessment data. Interim, or “short-cycle” assessments are administered by districts and schools three times each year to provide a snapshot of how students are performing in literacy and math at that moment in time.

Under questioning from subcommittee members, however, Steinhaus acknowledged that interim assessment data is imperfect, because districts used different assessments, making district-to-district comparisons impossible. 

While seventy-one districts and charter schools use Cognia’s Interim Measures of Student Success and Achievement, the total enrollment of those districts/schools make up only 38% of NM students. “Therefore, the data…is not representative of all New Mexico students and should be interpreted with caution,” the memo says.

Results from state standardized tests administered this

Quick Hits

Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham this week signed an executive order directing the Public Education Department to reduce “administrative burdens” for teachers and school administrators by 25 percent by the start of the upcoming school year.

The order does not specify how that reduction should be measured, nor does it provide any details on what ‘administrative burdens’ should be cut back or eliminated. The Albuquerque Journal reported that Public Education Secretary Kurt Steinhaus said the state is hiring a contractor to develop how to measure the reduction.

“Our kids should be the focus of everything we do at New Mexico schools, and teachers and administrators did not choose these professions to spend their days filling out paperwork,” Lujan Grisham said in a press release announcing the executive order. 

“While we need robust data reporting and collection to track our students’ progress, we have a responsibility to streamline those requirements and ensure they are not overly burdensome. I hope this executive order has education professionals breathing a sigh of relief today.”

The press release also quotes two school superintendents thanking the governor for her action. “In a small district, the reporting inordinately falls on superintendents and school leaders who are also balancing other tasks like evaluating staff, guiding instruction, directing assessments and sometimes even driving a school bus,” said Logan Municipal Schools Superintendent Dennis Roch. 

“So reducing burdensome reporting can free district leaders to focus on the primary goal of teaching and learning.”

Steinhaus said that in addition to reducing paperwork, the PED would “be improving efficiencies and the quality of information so school leaders can make better decisions, like how to improve math instruction or how to better help kids learn to read.”

Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham this week signed