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.
Democrat Diane Denish and Republican Susana Martinez will tackle education at a debate hosted by APS tonight.
It’s a daunting subject for an inaugural debate. The state’s educational picture is complex, one that defies easy prescriptions and bumper-sticker rhetoric, although examples of each might be in ample supply during tonight’s face off.
For many though, the subject boils down to this: Despite persistent efforts to improve the state’s standings New Mexico still lags at the bottom of many national lists measuring educational performance and attainment. The question on many people’s minds is what will Denish or Martinez do about it if elected governor.
It’s not for a lack of trying that New Mexico has remained buried at the bottom of many educational measures.
The state has expanded its pre-kindergarten programs in recent years, acting on the growing body of research that says the earlier a child can read the better chances are that he or she will graduate from high school. Public school teachers are paid more. And requirements needed to graduate from high school are stronger today than in the past, an improvement that prepares more students for college says the respected College Board.
New Mexico and teachers’ unions also agreed recently to work together to devise “a fair system of linking a major part of teacher evaluation, not necessarily pay, to student growth,” Veronica Garcia, the state’s former education secretary, said.
But despite all the effort there hasn’t been an accompanying, noticeable rise in student test scores. The gap between Anglo students’ test scores and that of their minority counterparts – called the achievement gap – has stubbornly persisted. And high school graduation rates, while having improved, remain low by national standards.
Garcia said she is watching the race to see where the candidates come down on continuing the state’s efforts, which some have described as laying a strong foundation for moving forward.
“All of those different reforms need to be continued,” Garcia told the Independent on Wednesday. ”I think there are some people who want to back off high school requirement rates.”
Candidates push competing plans
For her part, Martinez, the GOP candidate, has said if she is elected governor she’d focus on getting more money back into the school classrooms to improve New Mexico’s standings.
The Republican wants to plow more than $70 million of already existing dollars back into the classroom, taking it from the bureaucracy. The money will help to recruit and retain good teachers, buy textbooks and to expand remedial help to struggling students and schools, her campaign has said.
Annual efficiency studies for New Mexico’s 89 local school districts also would help state officials discern “where taxpayer dollars are working and where they aren’t,” Martinez has said.
In the one area involving education that has generated noticeable friction between the candidates Martinez also has said she supports giving students and their families the opportunity of ‘school choice.’ Martinez has defined that as giving families the opportunity to choose whether to attend their neighborhood public school or a charter school, vocational school, or a virtual classroom.
The Denish campaign had another word for Martinez’s position — vouchers, a controversial idea in educational circles.
To drive home its point, the Denish camp linked to a video in which Martinez is recorded as saying public dollars should follow a student to a “Christian school, a Bapstist” school if that’s where the parent thinks the child should go to school.
Martinez’s campaign said she is trying to give students more opportunities but that she doesn’t support traditional vouchers.
For her part, Denish has said she has a better plan for moving New Mexico education forward and it involves a lot of what she’s already done during the eight years as the state’s Democratic lieutenant governor.
Most recently Denish cast the lone vote at the State Board of Finance against across-the-board 3.2 percent cuts to state agencies. She voted that way because the cuts would have included public education, Denish has said.
Denish also hasn’t been shy about touting her support for early childhood education in New Mexico, and how she fought for funding to expand “a state program which provided access to quality education for more than 1,400 children,” according to her campaign.
Meanwhile, the Democrat has focused on New Mexico’s low high school graduation rates, in 2009 hosting a Graduation Summit for New Mexico, a symposium that convened more than 500 people, her campaign said. The participants included young people, educators, lawmakers, administrators, the business community and non-profits who came together to address high school graduation and other critical issues, her campaign said.
School nutrition and other priorities
While the two candidates have laid out various plans to improve test scores and bump up high school graduation rates, Mary Jo Quintana, a parent with two children at Sunset View Elementary in Albuquerque, wants to know where the two women stand on another issue: school nutrition and physical fitness, specifically a bill currently before Congress.
The federal legislation, introduced by New Mexico’s junior U.S. Senator, Tom Udall, would raise health and physical education classes to the level of core subjects, making them requirements.
“There’s been numerous studies on how eating healthy and exercise produce better test results,” Quintana said, adding that better nutrition appears linked to higher educational attainment as well. “It’s not like we’re making this up,” Quintana said.
For now the election season leading up to the November election gives the two gubernatorial candidates time to hone their educational proposals, but a difficult reality will greet the next governor as soon as January, her first month in office. That’s when the New Mexico Legislature convenes to deal with the state’s woeful budgetary situation.
New Mexico is short of cash thanks to tax revenues that haven’t kept up with spending. And policy makers must decide whether or not to exempt public school funding from painful cuts that look all but certain, or to cut other programs and agencies deeper if public education is exempted. Raising taxes is yet another option, a politically delicate but potentially necessary one for the first-term governor.
Funding for public education accounts for nearly half of all state spending.
For Garcia, the state’s former public education secretary, she hopes the next governor will remain committed to efforts already put in place.
“It is critical,” Garcia said. “We don’t want to go backwards. Because of funding we may not be abe to expand like we wanted to, but we have to stay the course.”
