I am writing today to announce the closure of the New Mexico Independent. After three and a half years of operation in New Mexico, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news…
While environmental activists played their part yesterday during demonstrations at the capitol building, going so far as to dress up as solar panels and to sing the tune of “You Are My Sunshine,” their counterparts, the anti-cap-and-trade contingency who has…
Roughly one quarter of University of New Mexico students are unimpressed with the state’s flagship public school, according to a survey that questioned college students about their higher education experiences.
The Albuquerque Journal takes a look at why La Mesa elementary school third graders are at higher proficiency levels than their fourth- and fifth-grade counterparts. The students at La Mesa meet the federal poverty guidelines and most of the students come from Spanish-speaking homes. Educators say they test higher because they take the tests in Spanish.
If a child is tested in a language he’s not proficient in, it becomes a language test and not a knowledge test,” said third-grade teacher Tina Hernandez-Zudell, who has taught at La Mesa for seven years and has a doctorate in education.
While across the district, third-graders typically perform higher than fourth-graders for many reasons, the difference at La Mesa is much more dramatic. Indeed, a look at proficiency levels finds the La Mesa third-graders tested in Spanish had exceedingly high performance over the past four years in math, with 82 percent to 93 percent of the students testing proficient or above. In reading, 57 percent to 64 percent of the third-grade Spanish testers were proficient or above…
At schools nearby, the highest proficiency level was a 52.4 percent at Emerson and a 51.8 percent at Hawthorne, where a majority tested in English.
The educators at La Mesa say it takes seven to 10 years for someone who isn’t a native English speaker to become proficient in English. The goal of the teachers is to make sure their students become proficient in English while also mastering their other subjects, like math, science and social studies.
You know how we’re drinking Rio Grande river water now? The Santa Fe New Mexican has an indepth piece explaining how it the system works. Here is a brief excerpt:
Narrow steel panels stretched across the river in the North Valley began diverting millions of gallons of water through an intricate, $385 million engineering marvel of channels, filters, pumps, pipes and sensors, mixing the river water with groundwater and sending it through the taps of more than a half-million Albuquerque and Bernalillo County customers. The clear water flowing from faucets looks nothing like the brown, dirt-laden water flowing into the system from the river.
More than ever now, the river is vital to the people living west of the Sandias. By 2011, half their water will come from the Rio Grande. Fifty miles upstream, Santa Fe is building another Rio Grande diversion project to serve its customers. Downstream, El Paso pulls the silt-filled water from the same river for household and industrial use.
Also, U.S. Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., chaired a Senate hearing in El Paso that focused on border violence, the Las Cruces Sun-News reports. Kerry agreed with the analysis that the U.S. black market for drugs and weapons is fueling the conflict.
