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There are plenty of questions surrounding the Albuquerque High School student who paid $200 to a charter school so he could retake senior English over a weekend and graduate on time.
How you can cram a semester’s worth of work into four days online and call it a state-approved public education is at the top of the list. So it is incumbent on the New Mexico Department of Education to find out: ♦ How the senior was allowed to enroll in, complete and get credit for a semester-long course through Southwest Secondary charter school in the last week of the school year. ♦ Whether this insta-credit is an isolated error, as Southwest Secondary head administrator Scott Glasrud says, or a routine practice, say among high school jocks who need to regain academic eligibility, as Eldorado principal Martin Sandoval says. Glasrud says he had a deal with APS not to accept kids after March 31 to avoid just what happened here. It also is important that APS follow up on Superintendent Winston Brooks’ vow to find out whether the AHS counselor who told the student about the Southwest Secondary class knew how fast it could be done. “If the counselor said, ‘there is a quick and dirty way that you can do this over the weekend,’ then that’s wrong, and we will deal with it,” Brooks said. This year, 289 APS students took 387 classes from Southwest Secondary, which is a state-chartered school. As such, APS must accept its credits. New Mexico is in the middle of adopting serious reforms to improve the quality of the K-12 public education that taxpayers fund and students receive. To honor the time students and teachers put into classroom instruction, to justify the testing students go through, to validate the measurements on proficiency as well as letter grades on schools, there can’t be escape routes where students can skirt the rigors demanded of them by their teachers. For the system and the reforms to have any credibility, APS and PED must “deal with it” and answer these questions openly, and sooner rather than later. One question not high on the list is Brooks’ concern over whether the arrangement is unfair to low-income students who can’t afford to shell out $200. That might sound politically correct, but it’s worrying about the wrong thing. 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.
