Every legislative session ends with notable achievements and glaring disappointments.
On the plus side, this Legislature passed a budget that spends $5.6 billion and includes several tax breaks intended to stimulate New Mexico’s economy. And $29.8 million was rustled up to help pay to redo the Interstate 25 and Paseo del Norte interchange. Negatives include the failure of legislation aimed at keeping the New Mexico’s Spaceport competitive and Senate leadership once again maneuvering to avoid an up-or-down vote on the proposed repeal of driver’s licenses for illegal immigrants. Expect both issues to be front and center in November, when all legislative seats are up for election. But out of all the actions taken or issues kicked down the road, this 2012 legislative session will go down as one in which the Legislature failed students in New Mexico’s schools. Legislators had the chance to pass two reforms aimed at moving the state in the direction of real improvements in education but instead buckled under to unions and the entrenched education establishment — including Albuquerque Public Schools, which lobbied against the reforms — and decided that the status quo was good enough. Here’s the status quo: ♦ Proficiency levels in reading and math in the 30s in many classrooms. ♦ Graduation rates just better than 60 percent. ♦ Remedial coursework required by 49 percent of high school graduates who enter college. One failed reform would have revamped teacher and principal evaluations to reflect student achievement, rather than relying solely on experience and education levels. It would have rewarded great teachers. The other would have ended the practice of “social promotion” of third-graders who can’t read. Resources to boost literacy would have started in kindergarten. The Legislature’s failure to move in the right direction came the same week New Mexico was added to an elite list of 11 states that were granted waivers from the federal No Child Left Behind Act. The waiver, which gives New Mexico more flexibility in how it spends federal education dollars and in how it evaluates its education system, was announced Wednesday by President Obama’s top education official. It was granted with the expectation that teacher evaluations would be reformed. U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan, in announcing the waiver, counseled that “as New Mexico implements these reforms, it is important that all stakeholders are at the table and their voices are heard. We encourage the governor and her team to work closely and in a bipartisan manner with the Legislature, and to fully include educators, community and tribal leaders and parents in the process of advancing these reforms.” The governor and her education team did try reaching out, and they did try compromise. Teacher evaluation reform was crafted with input from three months of meetings with teachers and other school leaders who have a combined 100 years of classroom experience. Reading reform was revised to allow parents to override a school’s decision to hold back a student if they had participated in all the intervention attempts to get the child to read at grade level. Both measures had bipartisan support and both passed both the House and Senate — just not in the right sequence. And that wasn’t by accident. Despite the push from the Obama administration, hard work by the administration and key Democrats such as Rep. Mary Helen Garcia and Sens. John Arthur Smith and Cynthia Nava it wasn’t enough to push real compromise reform packages across the finish line as they were sidetracked in such a way as to avoid key roll call votes. Nava, a former superintendent of the Gadsden Independent School District, acknowledged in the debate over social promotion that having to hold a child back can be tough on self esteem — but not as tough as being illiterate. Apparently, not enough of her colleagues agreed. This editorial first appeared in the Albuquerque Journal. It was written by members of the editorial board and is unsigned as it represents the opinion of the newspaper rather than the writers.
