APS board approves annual targets for turning around student outcomes

The Albuquerque Public Schools board on Wednesday approved annual targets for the school district to reach in its larger, five-year effort to turn around outcomes for its students.

The annual goals lay out, year by year, where APS students should be each year over the next five years on the board’s four, five-year goals.

School board members approved the new annual targets on a 5-0 vote.

“We will have a very clear understanding if we’re meeting our annual target,” said acting Superintendent Gabriella Blakey. “... Without annual targets, a long-term target is obviously very difficult to see if you’re going to make it.”

The annual targets serve as a way of tracking the district’s progress on larger board goals approved by the panel last year, based on community feedback.

Those goals make reference to the landmark Yazzie-Martinez consolidated lawsuit, which in 2018 yielded a decision from a judge finding that New Mexico wasn’t providing a sufficient education system for Native American students, economically disadvantaged students, English learners and students with disabilities.

The board’s goals, which require the district to make 10 percentage-point gains over five years in four categories, are:

• Improving the reading proficiency rates of third graders identified in the Yazzie-Martinez lawsuit, plus African-American students, from about 27%;
• Improving the math proficiency rates of those student groups, this time in the eighth grade, from about 11%;
• Improving graduates’ readiness for life after high school, as measured by the number of students receiving Advanced Placement, Dual Credit or other credits, from about 40%;
• And developing students’ skills, habits and mindsets necessary for success in life, from about 25.5%.

Under the annual targets, APS is required to make 1 percentage point gain in each of the first two years of the timeline. That would gradually ramp up over the next three years to make up all 10 percentage points.

Blakey described that strategy as a “sleep, creep, leap method.”

“The first year is really putting in the foundation and the work for our little seedling goals, to have the right conditions in which they can grow,” she said.

The only deviation from that rule comes with the fourth goal, which requires 2 percentage-point gains in the middle three years and then a 4 percentage point jump in the fifth, each in the percentage of students who demonstrate each of the four skills, habits and mindsets identified by the board: perseverance; self-regulation; self-efficacy; and social awareness.

“We look forward to seeing these annual goals show up in our progress monitoring reports, and seeing the progress with them as well,” board President Danielle Gonzales said.