Education

New Mexico’s gubernatorial candidates disagree over how often to test the state’s schoolchildren, the Associated Press reports.
The Santa Fe New Mexican profiles an Arizona high school graduate who is undocumented and recently came to New Mexico to attend college in Española.
A team from New Mexico Tech is participating in a study that could enhance the [...]

Democrat Diane Denish and Republican Susana Martinez promise not to cut spending on education at the same time they will not raise your taxes if elected governor. But the economic realities that will confront the winner of the governor’s race likely will make confetti of those promises.
The Associated Press has an analysis out today of the [...]

Massachusetts, New York, Hawaii, Florida, Rhode Island, D.C., Maryland, Georgia, North Carolina, and Ohio won money Tuesday in the second round of the Race to the Top federal grant program, which is sending more than $4 billion to reform-minded states and Washington, D.C..  Tennessee and Delaware won in the contest’s first-round this year.
Not a single [...]

The biggest winner of Thursday’s gubernatorial debate on education may have been someone not even in the room: state auditor Hector Balderas. In a rare meeting of the minds Thursday night, both Denish and Martinez said that schools need to be more financially responsible and that more and better auditing is necessary. The State Auditor’s Office is charged with an oversight role in how taxpayer money is spent, but has not always gotten the money it needs to do that. “Everybody publicly supports the concept of auditing,” Balderas said Thursday night, noting that his agency has been cut more severely than the rest of state government.

Is Secretary of State Mary Herrera playing the snoop? It appears that way, writes Steve Terrell of the Santa Fe New Mexican. Herrera submitted a public records request for e-mail correspondence by several individuals, including critics of her office.
Sandia Labs has announced cuts to future retirees’ benefits, the Albuquerque Journal writes.
Two top officials at the [...]

Democrat Diane Denish and Republican Susana Martinez will tackle education at a debate hosted by APS tonight. Martinez says she’d focus on getting more money back into the school classrooms if elected governor. Denish says she’d continue the work she’s already done on improving K-12 education in New Mexico.

New Mexico ranks 47th among states in the number of 25 to 34 year olds with an associate’s degree or higher and 48th when it comes to students who graduate with a bachelor’s degree within six years, according to a new report from the College Board’s Advocacy and Policy Center.
According to the organization’s 2010 Progress [...]

Public school teachers, administrators and teacher’s aides will benefit from $2.5 million in federal stimulus funds meant to offset the costs of increased insurance premiums and to expand professional development opportunities, Gov. Bill Richardson announced Monday.
Roughly $2 million of the total will go toward helping 33,400 teachers and school employees across the state pay their [...]

New Mexico’s first gubernatorial debate has been scheduled for Thursday, Aug. 19 at Eldorado High School in Albuquerque, and the topic will be education. Albuquerque Public Schools is hosting the debate, which will be moderated by Superintendent Winston Brooks.
The Independent will be on hand to live blog the event, in collaboration with the political team [...]

Albuquerque Public Schools’s share of extra education dollars Congress approved Tuesday is around $15 million according to latest estimates, a district spokesman said Wednesday.
Under a complicated scenario that assumes APS might be staring at a $19 million budget hole because of ongoing state budget woes, that $15 million won’t be enough to avoid district layoffs, [...]

The U.S. House of Representatives on Tuesday passed a $26 billion bill that includes extra health care funding — a projected $126 million — and additional education money — $65 million — for New Mexico at a time when the state is in desperate need of a cash infusion. But State Rep. Keith Gardner, R-Roswell, said the move is a Band-Aid that only masks the need to make more cuts.

Some Albuquerque Public Schools teachers fear the district plans to increase class sizes claiming that their classrooms are already so packed that they violate fire codes daily, reports KOB-TV.
The Rio Grande Sun reports the Española City Council approved an additional $360,000 budget cut for 2011 after the finance department realized insurance costs for employees had raised the basic budget by $500,000. The [...]

The Taos News reports on Tuesday the Taos Municipal Board of Education rejected a contract from the teacher’s union that would have prevented salary cuts while taking away rewards for education and experience.
The Santa Fe Public Schools District refuses to send district budget records via e-mail to the The Rio Grande Foundation due to a policy that protects [...]

New Mexico’s students might have improved their math, science and reading skills over half a dozen years, but state officials announced yesterday that three-fourths of the state’s schools failed to meet this year’s goal for student improvement, according to the Associated Press.
Here’s a key fact from the AP story:
Public Education Secretary Susanna Murphy released the [...]

Democrat Diane Denish and Republican Susana Martinez have agreed to the first gubernatorial debate and it will tackle education.
The debate will occur Aug. 19 at Eldorado High School in Albuquerque, according to a news release sent out by the Denish campaign Monday afternoon. The event will be hosted by Albuquerque Public Schools.

New Mexico’s permanent endowment trust funds took a beating in the stock market between March and June, losing three-quarters of a billion dollars.
The state Land Grant Permanent Fund, the state’s largest endowment, lost 6.4 percent of its value — a half-billion dollars — between March and June, State Investment Council (SIC) spokesman Charles Wollman told [...]

KOB-TV reports a former employee of a Wells Fargo in New Mexico has been accused of embezzling money from a customer’s escrow account.
An employee of New Mexico State University filed a lawsuit against the university accusing it of retaliation after she disclosed evidence that her co-worker mismanaged public funds, reports The Alamogrodo Daily Times.
The Farmington Daily Times reports superintendents of [...]

Even though New Mexico didn’t win the money, the state will continue to pursue the education reforms spelled out in its 200-page application for federal Race to the Top education funds, Gov. Bill Richardson’s new education secretary, Dr. Susanna Murphy, said in a news release issued Tuesday afternoon.
Those reforms included “linking teacher and principal evaluations to student [...]

New Mexico once again apparently has missed the cut in the Obama administration’s Race to the Top program, which is doling out federal dollars to states adopted innovative approaches to K-12 education, The Wall Street Journal reported ahead of the official announcement, scheduled for later today.
New Mexico had applied for $75 million in this round [...]

Despite bucking a national trend of increasing child poverty and a reduction in school drop-out rates, New Mexico ranks last or near-last in seven of 10 measures of child welfare, from teen deaths to proportion of children living in poverty, according to a report released today by the Annie E. Casey Foundation.