Reporter Andrea Schoellkopf writes that “Albuquerque Public Schools could face immediate cuts of $25 million to $30 million in its $668.5 million budget if the state orders budget cuts for public education.”

Gov. Bill Richardson and state lawmakers are beginning to negotiate how to close a projected $441 million budget gap for the year that ends June 30. And while the governor has come out against cutting public school spending, state lawmakers in on the negotiations say such an option must remain on the table.

If indeed the state’s public school spending is trimmed, “you’re in a heap of doo-doo,” Schoellkopf quotes Albuquerque Public Schools Superintendent Winston Brooks as telling the school board recently.

Schoellkopf goes on to write:

Brooks said layoffs are a possibility because the district already has agreed to tap into its $22 million reserve fund. Under recently approved labor agreements, the district will spend about $6 million from the reserve fund to pay all APS employees for one-time reimbursement for training outside the work day.

Districts were warned last month that the state’s tax base was deteriorating more quickly than expected, with a $433 million state budget gap. Brooks said legislators have told school districts they might see a 3 percent to 5 percent cut in this year’s budget.

But Albuquerque Teachers Federation president Ellen Bernstein tells the Journal that state law prevents class sizes from being increased, so the district could not cut “a bunch of teachers.”

“There’s a lot of ways to balance the budget without cutting education,” Bernstein said. “They already cut by $30 a student. School districts are dying… Programs are to the bare bones.”

The union has proposed rolling back tax cuts that were approved in 2003, closing corporate loopholes that cost the state $60 million to $80 million and investing $1.8 billion in federal stimulus dollars.

Whether or not the state’s public school spending is ultimately trimmed this year will depend on the final budget agreement the governor and the Legislature reach sometime in the next two months.

I suspect that like many teachers, teachers’ aides, school administrators and parents across the state are interested in what the state ultimately decides to do.

A legislative committee has recommended studying and designing a pilot project, and the state’s education secretary says she’s considering the idea.

“I think it merits some looking into,” New Mexico Public Education Department Secretary Veronica Garcia said this week of merit pay, which she described as a “provocative concept.”

Garcia’s qualified endorsement of studying merit pay pushes New Mexico into a national debate over the efficacy of basing part of a teacher’s pay on performance, as well as how that performance should be measured.

The effort also brings the state into a national discussion over whether standardized test-based results, as used in the federal No Child Left Behind Act, accurately reflect students’ performance amid the often complex mix of factors that affect educational achievement.

Earlier this year President Obama publicly supported merit pay to the consternation of some teachers’ unions, who argue that many factors, including poverty and parental involvement, not just a teacher’s ability, affects a child’s educational achievement and any standard that measures an educator’s performance should reflect that complexity.

Supporters of merit pay, however, say that it strengthens accountability and point to research that says teacher quality is one of the most important school-based factors in driving student achievement.

The question of merit pay comes on the heels of a national index from Education Week that ranks New Mexico 51st in providing a foundation for educational achievement.

In New Mexico, the idea is front and center thanks to a report by the Legislative Finance Committee (LFC), the Legislature’s budget arm, which  periodically reviews state programs as part of its charge. The committee’s report found that student performances aren’t improving in proportion to the teacher salary increases of recent years.

In July 2004 New Mexico’s three-tier licensure system went into effect, upping public school teachers’ pay by establishing a minimum salary of $30,000 and creating a progression of pay increases that are linked to three levels of teaching licenses. The most experienced teachers who achieve certain benchmarks to earn a Level III teaching license receive a base salary of $50,000.

Citing the lack of comparable student achievement, the LFC recommended a pilot pay-for-performance project that would provide bonuses or incentives to high-performing teachers in general and even greater incentives to high-performing teachers that relocate to high-need schools.

While some lawmakers and state officials have questioned the LFC’s methodology — in particular its exclusive use of student scores on a state standardized test to measure teacher performance — the idea of merit pay hasn’t been swatted away summarily.

Garcia and others say merit pay is worth considering, but only if a more comprehensive set of data than student standardized test scores is used to assess teachers.

Standardized tests also don’t account for the complexity involved in the educational process, let alone the diversity of children who fill a classroom, lawmakers said.

“I take my brother-in-law who taught English,” said GOP state Sen. Vernon Asbill of Carlsbad, who is a former school district superintendent and principal. “He was one of the best English teachers I ever knew. He liked taking kids who were not high performers and enjoyed teaching them. If you look at the result of testing to determine merit pay, he probably never would have qualified.”

Added Ellen Bernstein, president of the Albuquerque Teachers Federation: “We are not complaining about being held accountable, but [about] the measures you are using. They are not rich enough. They don’t account for all of their work.”

“It is not asking the more complex questions of what can you do with this information,” Bernstein added. “One of the issues we’ve never dealt with is if the most inexpensive way of measuring a child’s growth – is it really telling us anything?”

Perhaps a student’s educational growth during a school year would be a better standard to use when trying to gauge a teacher’s quality than a student’s static standardized test score, Garcia said.

For example, such a model would assess the progress a fifth-grade student makes from the beginning of the year — at a third-grade reading level – to the year end – reading at a fourth-grade level.

That, at least, would acknowledge the bevy of challenges that New Mexico faces in regards to educational achievement, officials said.

According to the recent Education Week index, New Mexico confronts a series of socioeconomic obstacles to across-the-board high educational achievement.

New Mexico ranks behind all other states and the District of Columbia, according to Education Week’s Chance for Success index, which tracks several economic and educational measures, including high rates of poverty and lower rates of educational achievement for parents of school children. Just over a third of New Mexico children have at least one parent who has a post-secondary degree.

The index highlights the rate of poverty and the paucity of 3 and 4 year olds who are enrolled in pre-school, which some experts say is important to helping ready children for school. The number of families with incomes at least 200 percent of the poverty level is 48.9 percent, and the percent of 3 year olds and 4 year olds enrolled in pre-school is 38.2 percent.

Add to that the fact that about 25 percent of New Mexico children live in poverty, while more than 60 percent of New Mexico students are from low-income families, according to the LFC report. (The report’s author came up with the 60 percent figure using the broader socioeconomic indicator of student participation in the Free and Reduced School Lunch Program.)

Additionally, one in three New Mexico students are concentrated in high poverty schools, the LFC report says.

Some in the teachers’ unions suggest that state lawmakers should focus on the big-picture issues of high poverty rates and the state’s high health care uninsured rate at the same time they try to institute education reform.

State Rep. Mimi Stewart, D-Albuquerque, says that a pilot isn’t a bad idea if a teacher’s performance is based on a mix of factors. But, she added, the state already is weeding out bad teachers through its three-tier licensure system.

“We did tie their pay to performance,” Stewart said. Teachers “do have to show student movement and growth. We already have weeded out teachers with this dossier process.”

Prior to the state’s adoption of the three-tier licensure system as many as 12 to 13 percent of New Mexico’s public school teachers weren’t qualified in the area of study they are teaching, Stewart said.

“We’re down to 1 to 2 percent (of teachers) who are not qualified, down from 12 percent,” Stewart said.

Asbill, the Republican state senator, said he’s fine with trying out a merit pay pilot project.

“I would venture to say if we want to do a pilot, that’s fine,” Asbill said.

But Asbill said he’s not optimistic about finding a model that will capture the complexity of what goes into the educational process.

“I don’t know in all my experience of any real good model for merit pay in education,” he said. “There are so many variables that occur. It’s very complicated.”

“If you watched the last debate, you saw how far apart John McCain and Barack Obama are when it comes to education reform,” Ellen Bernstein, president of the Albuquerque Teachers Federation, told NMI.

While Bernstein and the teachers unions are firmly in Obama’s corner, she said there’s still room for improvement in the Democratic candidate’s education platform. For one, she would like to see No Child Left Behind dumped altogether.

“Sen. Obama believes that NCLB can be fixed,” she told NMI. “He wants to fund it to fix it, and I don’t think that will do it. It needs to be scrapped. Prominent educators have said it needs to be scrapped. He should come out stronger against NCLB.”

But other than the federal NCLB, Obama is seen as a more favorable candidate from the union’s perspective. She said that McCain has vowed to stick by NCLB.

“I think many educators see NCLB as a destructive, bad policy, another one of many created by the Bush administration,” Bernstein said.

The candidates have other distinct differences, according to Bernstein.

McCain is for school vouchers, a key difference, she said.

Using public money for private school tuition will endanger the foundation of public schools. NCLB has already done a lot to shake that, which is the foundation of our democracy. …There are a lot of examples where the free market and private business principles do not work for public institutions, and this is one of those principles.

Obama doesn’t favor vouchers, though he has firmly supported the creation of more charter schools. Bernstein said his stance can be problematic in some states.

“In New Mexico, charters are public schools. However, in other states, charter schools are used as one piece of the road towards vouchers,” she said. “And there’s no evidence that charterizing is better than investing in our public school system as it exists now.”