Editorial: Defenders of Status Quo Should Embrace Reform

Let’s say for a moment you are a third-grade student struggling with reading, like the 52.6 percent of New Mexico’s third-graders who are not proficient, or with math, like 51.4 percent who can’t calculate at grade level. Who has your best interests at heart:

A. The teachers union leader who marches outside the Public Education Department with a megaphone, decrying new teacher evaluations that will take into account improvements in student performance, or

B. The teachers union leader who, with some well-thought-out and well-explained caveats, supports revising the evaluations to include student achievement gains in the mix?

Or let’s say you are a 10th-grade student who doesn’t want to join the 33.5 percent of Albuquerque Public Schools students who don’t graduate or the 47 percent of APS grads who have to take remedial coursework in college. Who has your best interests at heart:

A. The district superintendent who consistently rejects accountability measures using test scores — tests designed by New Mexico teachers — and says educators need a few more years to devise a system, or

B. The six districts with 34 schools that have signed up to pilot the new evaluations — because they understand the vast majority of students get only one chance at each grade level?

In this quiz there are wrong answers. They involve maintaining the status quo and ignoring the federal mandate to link teacher evaluations to student performance. Albuquerque Teachers Federation President Ellen Bernstein leading a chant of “one two three four kids are not a test score, five six seven eight we just want to educate” does not advance the discussion or help that third-grader or 10th-grader. Neither does APS Superintendent Winston Brooks’ concern for making the new system work with the current three-tier teacher licensing system. The Legislative Finance Committee determined in 2006 and again in 2009 that despite its cost, three-tier licensing has not improved education outcomes in the state.

Meanwhile, Charles Bowyer, the executive director of the state chapter of the National Education Association, has student success in mind when he agrees there is need for reform. His suggestions include giving districts flexibility beyond the Standards-Based Assessment to measure student progress and providing a transparent and detailed method for decoding evaluations. That is constructive input.

And then there are the districts — Aztec, Bernalillo, Central, Los Alamos, Las Cruces and T or C — that have signed up to ensure their great teachers are recognized and those who need mentoring are identified and helped.

PED has shown it is willing to adjust to get the best reflection of teaching quality. Originally it proposed saddling teachers of grades and subjects that are not covered by SBA with their school’s overall grade, a plan sure to discourage great teachers from taking on challenging assignments. More changes should come out of this one-year pilot period — this is a new system, after all. Under the new proposal, the evaluations will rely on SBA gains, classroom observations and district-determined measures of effectiveness. And because the SBA covers only reading and math and grades three through eight, 10 and 11, districts will determine assessments for other grades and subjects.

Brooks says figuring out alternative assessment measures should take years. First, New Mexico has been passing students in subjects beyond reading and math for years, and one would hope there is some measure of success to be gleaned from those passing grades. Second, our students don’t have years.

The NEA and the districts that have signed up for the pilot project deserve a lot of credit for standing up against the status quo and putting accountability for educators and to taxpayers into the mix.

The ATF and the state’s other districts should consider getting on board and trying to develop a better system rather than keeping with the strategy of no new system will ever be quite good enough. Under the current scenario, Brooks can continue to say he is surprised and disappointed, as he did with the last round of mediocre SBA results for APS kids.

Or they can remain satisfied with the state’s shameful proficiency, graduation and remedial education numbers and revise Bernstein’s chant:

“One two three four we can’t read or write no more, five six seven eight only half will graduate.”

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.