58 percent of New Mexico teachers are white, despite minorities constituting an overwhelming majority of the state’s student body.

The findings come out of a set of reports published by a Washington, D.C. think tank that examined the dearth of minority teachers in states having a student body less than 50 percent white.

New Mexico’s student-teacher race disparity ranked in the top 12 nationwide, according to the report. The state’s scored a “29,” meaning the percentage of minority students was 29 percentage points higher than the number of minority teachers.

California scored the highest: 72 percent of the state’s students are of color while only 29 percent of teachers identified as non-white. In Texas, Two-thirds of students are non-white yet only one-third of teachers have similar backgrounds.

Others studies also point to the educational benefits of having more teachers of color.

A 2004 paper  analyzing teacher racial composition and pupil test-results in Tennessee found a small boost in student performance on standardized tests when teachers of the same race taught the class. After four years of receiving instruction from a same-race teacher students improved test scores by a range of 8 to 12 percentage points. Those findings applied to white students as well.

More recently, a 2011 working study by economists focusing on a large community college in California pointed to strong gains by minority students taught by instructors from any minority background.

“Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, and Native Americans are 2.9 percentage points more likely to pass courses with instructors of similar background and 2.8 percentage points more likely to pass courses with underrepresented instructors,” it found.

The authors added: “These effects represent roughly  half of the total gaps in classroom outcomes between white and underrepresented minority students at the college. The effects are particularly large for Blacks. The class dropout rate relative to Whites is 6 percentage points lower for Black students when taught by a Black  instructor.”

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.

From KOAT:

UNM students who said in interviews Wednesday that they were unsatisfied expressed frustrations ranging from class availability to a sense of detachment from university decision-makers according to the Performance Effectiveness Report.

UNM’s satisfaction rate has remained at 77 or 78 percent over the past 10 years.

Student satisfaction rates are higher than 95 percent at New Mexico State, Eastern New Mexico and Highlands universities. Students at New Mexico Tech and Western New Mexico report satisfaction rates above 84 percent.

University of New Mexico enrolls the most students of any university in the state, and is one of New Mexico’s largest job-generators. The university enrolls roughly 21,000 undergraduate students, while New Mexico State has 14,572 matriculating undergraduates and Eastern New Mexico and New Mexico Tech enroll 5080 and 1454, respectively.

Higher education has been under a microscope as job prospects have dimmed and additional education has become more valued. New student increases are forcing campuses to find new revenue streams to keep up services, often resulting in admitting more students who pay either higher or a greater percent of their tuition. The trend is most visible at public universities that have set their sights on out-of-state candidates who pay considerably greater tuition than local students — at times three times as much.

Taking into account a student’s ability to weather the financial burden of higher education has increasingly become an ethical dilemma.

Student default rates, as determined by the two-year cohort rate calculated by the U.S. Department of Education, is at a 12-year high, with 8.8 percent of graduates not paying their college loans for 270 days or more. A report issued (pdf) by the New America Foundation found that 15 percent of graduates defaulted, while 21 percent were delinquent on their payments.

But despite the costs and risks of falling behind in payments, arguments college is still worth it price abound.

Individuals possessing a college-equivalent degree can expect to earn 80 percent more than a person with a high school degree. An earlier study from researchers at Georgetown University found a college degree holder can expect to make $1.4 million more than someone with a high school degree.

New Mexico has bested all but two other states and the District of Columbia on the math portion of the biennial National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP), posting improvements among fourth- and eighth-graders.

Known as the nation’s report card, NAEP far better gauges student subject comprehension than state standardized tests and is often used by researchers to point out the somber state of K-12 education in the U.S.

The national average among fourth graders was 240; New Mexico students posted average scores of 233. Still, that is the closest the state has come to the national trend since 1996. Eighth-grade scores trailed the national average by nine points, 274 to 283, but the gap is also the closest since 1996. Meanwhile, state scores rose faster than the national average.

Still, New Mexico’s students have much on which to improve. Among fourth graders, 48 percent of the state’s white students are proficient or above, which trails the national trendy four points. Among Hispanics, the result is 23 percent to the country’s 24; Blacks 19 percent to the nation’s 17; and Native American students lag considerably, 15 percent to 24 percent.

Among students who qualify for a federal lunch subsidy, scores trailed the overall average and the national average for students deemed low-income.

Here is a breakdown of reading scores from the state snapshot offered by the Dept. of Ed. In brief, scores remained flat among fourth-graders in the state compared to 2009, and are down from 2007, 208 to 212. Eighth-graders improved from 254 to 256, trailing the national average by eight points. Here’s more information on fourth0grade scores:

In 2011, the average score of fourth-grade students in New Mexico was 208. This was lower than the average score of 220 for public school students in the nation. The average score for students in New Mexico in 2011 (208) was not significantly different from their average score in 2009 (208) and was not significantly different from their average score in 1992 (211).  In 2011, the score gap between students in New Mexico at the 75th percentile and students at the 25th percentile was 48 points. This performance gap was not significantly different from that of 1992 (47 points).  The percentage of students in New Mexico who performed at or above the NAEP Proficient level was 21 percent in 2011. This percentage was not significantly different from that in 2009 (20 percent) and was not significantly different from that in 1992 (23 percent).  The percentage of students in New Mexico who performed at or above the NAEP Basic level was 53 percent in 2011. This percentage was not significantly different from that in 2009 (52 percent) and was not significantly different from that in 1992 (55)

Over at the Shanker Blog, Matthew Di Carlo lays out the limitations of NAEP scores:

What I would like to see is for people on both “sides” to acknowledge that, no matter how the results turn out, they can’t be used to draw even moderately strong inferences about what works and what doesn’t. The main NAEP assessments provide a snapshot of math and reading performance among fourth and eighth graders at a single point in time. Even broken down by subgroup, the data can mask serious shifts in the conditions and characteristics of students taking the test. This is especially true given that the past two years are marked by severe economic hardship among U.S. families, as well as massive budget cuts to public education.

More importantly, test scores at this aggregate level – across entire states – cannot be used to make arguments about the causal impact of specific policies. There are just too many intervening factors, inside and outside of education policy, that can influence test scores. You can make suggestions, and present tentative evidence, and that’s all great. But you can’t draw anything resembling strong policy conclusions using these data alone. Period.

In an effort to stem the tide of controversy and criticism leveled at her since being designated earlier this year by Governor Susana Martinez as state education secretary, Hanna Skandera sent out a letter last week to the New Mexico Coalition of School Administrators asking for their help in reshaping the state’s social promotion bill, among other requests.

Most recently, Skandera’s department has been taking a beating in radio ads sponsored by Michael Corwin and his Independent Source PAC, in which the liberal political action committee took her, the governor and the state’s public education administrators to task for alleged conflicts of interest.

Skandera, though, seems to brush aside such indiscretions, nor does the fact that she’s still unconfirmed worry her either, having told the New Mexican in an interview yesterday, “I don’t care.”

Instead, she’s lobbying for the new A-F grading system, which lawmakers passed in last February’s legislative session. Toward that end, she’ll be holding a public meeting in Santa Fe October 31. She’s also hoping to gather more support for her controversial plan to revamp the social promotion bill.

Her plan, which she wants to rename the reading intervention bill, would jettison the practice of sending those third graders who cannot read at a proficient level onto the next grade. It’s an idea Corwin, among others, has argued against, citing sociologist and longtime member of the National Academy of Sciences Robert M. Houser’s congressional testimony that “the research evidence is overwhelming: Simply holding back students who have not achieved to the appropriate standard does not work.”

It’s also an agenda Skandera appears to have brought with her from Florida, where she served as Governor Jeb Bush’s deputy commissioner of education and advocated the eradication of social promotion, among other changes.

In 2007, Bush, along with Zachariah Zachariah and Brian Yablonski (both of whom have been under investigation by the SEC), founded the Foundation for Excellence in Education, a group that helped draft last year’s New Mexico senate bill 427, the so-called “education reform” bill introduced by Senator Vernon Asbill.

In her interview with the New Mexican, Skandera also told reporter Robert Nott of her desire to move New Mexico students into a virtual learning environment, one provided not by that already in place under the state’s Higher Education Department but one contracted out to a private company. Toward that end, Skandera said the state just submitted a grant to the Jaquelin Hume Foundation in order to raise funds for a study on digital-learning resources.

The push for digital learning is another facet of the “Florida model” of education: through his Digital Learning Council, Bush has also emphasized distance learning via the internet as a way to teach children; and distance learning that’s contracted out to private distance-learning companies such as K12, the company that contributed $5,000 to Martinez’s 2010 gubernatorial campaign.

The Hume Foundation was founded by in 1962 by Jaquelin Hume, a major donor to Ronald Reagan’s gubernatorial and presidential campaigns. Hume also founded Citizens for America, the conservative grass-roots organization once known as “President Reagan’s Lobby.” The Hume Foundation has connections to many other conservative and fundamentalist foundations, many of which were started up and are funded by ultra-conservatives like Richard Mellon Scaife and Charles and David Koch.

Skandera did not address Corwin’s ads nor any of the other issues raised by them. She did not respond to NMI’s request for comment.

During one of the most important Senate committee meetings on K-12 education in the past decade, Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.) had an active roll in pushing through a bill aimed at overhauling the much-maligned No Child Left Behind.

The legislation, Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), was proposed by the two leading Democrat and Republican Senators in the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee and articulated many of the terms and conditions states must honor to receive federal education dollars. On average, federal funds for schools amount to a tenth of total school budgets.

In his role as a sitting member of the HELP Committee, Sen. Bingaman successfully proposed an amendment that reauthorizes an educational technology grant program geared towards improving student learning. The Technology and Innovation (ATTAIN) Act of 2011 within the proposed bill would award funds to schools for increased technological literacy among students. It would also train teachers to better understand the digital tools available to them.

Funds will be distributed through an application-based process, and states will have to demonstrate teachers and librarians have the skills to use the technology services.

As written in the amendment, the goal for this measure is to raise student achievement, ensure highly effective teaching, and prepare all students so they can be on track to “college and career readiness for the 21 century digital economy.”

ATTAIN was earlier proposed as a standalone piece of legislation with two other Democratic Senators. A summary of that legislation can be found here.

President Johnson originally passed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act in 1965. NCLB is its current iteration, passed in 2002 by President Bush. Congress was supposed to reauthorize the law in 2007 but did not.  In recent months educators and local administrators called for the law to change, citing impossible performance targets and an over emphasis on standardized testing.

President Obama unveiled a series of waivers states could apply for to opt out of NCLB — a move that upset many  Republicans. The current ESEA bill needs to pass before early next year if Congress hopes to nullify the role of those waivers, which are set to take off in January.

Liberal muckraker and private investigator Michael Corwin, of the Albuquerque-based Independent Source PAC, a liberal political action committee, recently launched a trio of radio spots not merely critical of Governor Susana Martinez and her administration but seemingly intent on exposing what he sees as widespread hypocrisies and conflicts of interest within the Department of Education.

Working for free and having paid for the spots in order to generate more funds for his PAC, Corwin and his 30-second segments each focus on a very specific transgression: one on the hiring of chief of staff Keith Gardner’s wife at the Public Education Department; one on the apparent conflict of interest in choosing Paul Yarborough as State Personnel Board Chairman, despite his having served as vice president of an Albuquerque law firm that has state contracts totaling more than $500,000; and a third outlining the appointment of a onetime charter schools attorney as the state’s new charter-school czar.

Governor spokesman Scott Darnell offered up a “no comment” in a statement made in response to the ads, adding that they appeared to have been “backed by a shadow group.”

Corwin says the response from beyond the governor’s office so far has been great. “People are really loving them because they’re so unlike the usual political ads,” he said.

“It’s real information. It’s the first time some people are hearing about this conduct that’s been going on in the Martinez administration. There’s been this sort of honeymoon period. Well, these ads are our signaling that the honeymoon is over. They show that the governor has either been an absentee governor so far, or that her statements about ethics and code of conduct have been little more than lip service.”

Yesterday, the New Mexican reported on the anniversary of Dollars4Schools.org, a website that allows teachers to raise money for applied learning activities for their students.

From the article:

Dollars4Schools … has raised more than $100,000 and funded 60 programs within Santa Fe Public Schools in a year.

The site lists a number of various school programs requiring somewhere between $100 and $3,000 in funding. Teachers create the grants requests for the site. The minimum pledge is $25, and donors can go directly to the site — dollars4schools.org — to make a general pledge or focus in on a specific program or school.

[...]

The Community Foundation will completely take over the site by the end of this calendar year. SantaFe.com had already formed a partnership with the foundation and Santa Fe Public Schools, with no overhead to the site, that ensured that every dollar donated went directly to the programs.

Many of the programs funded employ a method called project-based learning, in which students tackle a subject by completing projects or activities that build on the content available through textbooks.

One grant proposal, with a financial contribution target of $409, would provide materials for 109 seventh- and eighth-graders for detailed projects helping explicate concepts in biology.

Another teacher asks for $500 (the instructor will assume the cost of shipping and handling the products) towards buying 25 microscope slides and six duo-scope microscopes for a month-long biology project. In the grant pitch, the teacher links to articles from the National Science Board and National Science Foundation that warn a drop-off in science and math acumen among elementary school children will undermine future U.S. growth.

Studies like this one from researchers in Hong Kong show project-based learning leads to positive gains in literacy and promote self-confidence among students, which encourages students to pursue inquiry on their own.

Other activities looking for funding include after-school programs. A charter school asked for $125 from donors to fund weekly learning-based clubs. The campus is set in a rural environment, meaning parent drive-times to pick up their children are longer than urban areas.

In a recent study released by the National Center on Time and Learning, additional school-sponsored instruction was found to improve test scores and provided a greater likelihood of students having their interests piqued by electives such as art or dance. During an event in Washington D.C. that featured panelists articulating the findings of the study, Education Secretary Arne Duncan told the audience, “we don’t need to study this issue anymore … [time] is a desperately important resource that has been under-utilized.”

At the heart of the problem with NCLB is its rigidity: The law does not take into account school progress in improving the academic performances of students. Instead, the nine-year-old legislation judges a school, and a state, for its ability hit annual benchmarks called Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP).

“I don’t think when we started this, it was about catch n’ kill,” begins Bill Bosher, a professor at Virginia Commonwealth University who served as superintendent of public instruction for the state from 1994 to 1997. “The intent was to have feedback on the performance of young people against a set of knowledge and skills.”

And though the original purpose of the law was to compel states to find innovative ways to have children learn more, the results have been less than sweeping.  The U.S. Department of Education released this National Center for Education Statistics report (PDF) that calculates from 2005-2009, there were 39 instances of states upping or maintaining the intensity of state standardized exams, and 40 in which the rigor of those tests decreased. That’s not the race to the bottom Dept. of Education Secretary Arne Duncan portrayed NCLB to be, but the record hardly lends support to the idea the law was effective in having all states expect more from their students by issuing harder exams. Observing alterations that only occurred in 2007-09, 28 were deemed improvements and five appeared to have had a watering-down effect.

That ratio looks better, but still, for an administration that went on the offensive calling out educators who don’t meet expectations, it’s no surprise a revamping of the law has become President Obama’s priority. After all, the law states that by 2014, nearly all schools will have total proficiency; as of 2010, only 62 percent of schools have met their states’ benchmarks.

And then there’s the separate matter of what state tests even reveal. “I think the idea is that the standards aren’t increasing fast enough,” says Jennifer Cohen of the New American Foundation. “It is one thing to have a set of standards made in a vacuum -– they may be getting harder but there is nothing to suggest that they are at all attached to what students need to know to succeed in college and career.”

Some education policy writers even wonder whether NCLB is receiving unfair blame for causing disruptions to schools and staff. Alexander Russo, a former Senate staffer and author on education, recently wrote, “[t]he reality is that firings, removals, and shutdowns are neither common, or widespread…and to the extent that they are happening, it’s the Obama administration’s own SIG school turnaround program that’s the cause, not NCLB.”

SIG, or school improvement grants, are awards given to local education authorities to intervene at schools languishing in the bottom rung of performance measures.

Anne Hyslop, a policy analyst at Education Sector, says the numbers tell a different story to Russo’s. In the first round of grants issued through the SIG program in 2010, 843 schools received (PDF) up to $6 million over three years to support school improvement efforts. Schools could choose from one of four models. One of these models was to close the school, but only 17 of the 843 schools chose that option. A second option was to restart the school under charter management. However, Hyslop says this option was also an unpopular choice -– just four percent (34) of SIG schools were reopened as a charter school. So only 50 schools were closed or reopened as a charter school in the first round of SIG grants.

Aspects of the SIG model were incorporated into the quid pro quo arrangement for states to receive waivers. But by and large, schools should now expect a gentler ride. Looking at data from the first round of SIG awards, the remaining 793 schools chose either the turnaround option, where the principal and 50 percent of instructional staff were replaced, or the transformation option, which allowed for a less-disruptive and rigid set of reforms to improve the school. Not surprisingly, the transformation model was the most popular, with 615 of the 843 signing on.

Even for states that have most of their schools at or exceeding expectations on AYP, Hyslop says swallowing the executive prophylactic to opt out of No Child Left Behind has its advantages. “They will no longer be under pressure to reach 100 percent student proficiency by 2014,” Hyslop says. “Every school in waiver-winning states will benefit from that provision.”

The tougher standards wouldn’t be complete without a call for college- and career-curriculum best practices that would justify a state’s increased cocktail of assessments. But with nearly every state and the District of Columbia likely to seek waivers, there’s a risk the new flexibilities issued by the administration will over-learn the monolithic hazards of NCLB. Hyslop agrees, but sees potential.

“If we have 50 different school improvement systems, let’s at least have one system for measuring whether they work,” she wrote previously. “Duncan’s waiver plan gives the federal government a chance to test these systems and find the most effective version” to incorporate into future law.

And yet, among education veterans, some cynicism remains. Given how much the administration is in need of a political victory, Bosher, the former superintendent of Virginia schools, cautions other states: “be careful negotiating with desperate people.”