APS students are the same, if not slightly better off, than statewide test scores. But can the same be said for its most underserved students?

Albuquerque Public Schools fared the same as, if not slightly better than, the rest of the state on standardized assessments from last school year, according to results published on the district’s data dashboard.

The gains were more or less the same. New Mexico as a whole had 4 percentage point gains in English, and APS students rose by 4.6 percentage points. But the latter’s landing point was higher, rising to a roughly 40% reading proficiency rate, just over New Mexico’s 38%.

In math, APS, as the rest of the state, did not significantly improve, gaining a ½ percentage point that brought the district’s proficiency rate to 25.6% — still higher, though, than the 24% statewide average.

Superintendent Scott Elder was cautiously optimistic about the reading gains, saying during a Wednesday night board meeting that while he would have liked to see more growth and that one year does not make a trend, “standing pat is not falling behind.”

“I’m pleased, but we’ve still got a long way to go,” he added in a Thursday interview. “I want to celebrate the gains, I want to give credit to those teachers and principals that are working so hard to help our students reach proficiency, but we need to still improve.”

The test results weren’t all good news. As they did the school year before, some of the district’s most underserved students continued to lag behind statewide averages.

For example, the district’s Black and economically disadvantaged students this year lagged behind the reading averages of their peers across the state by 5 and 3 percentage points, respectively. APS students with disabilities were behind their statewide peers by about 2 percentage points in math and English.

Each gap was present in the 2021-2022 school year, and widened in the case of Black students.

Elder said those sorts of gaps were why the school board put special focus on improving outcomes for student groups identified in the landmark Yazzie-Martinez lawsuit, which found that English learners, students with disabilities, economically disadvantaged students and Native American students weren’t being provided a sufficient education system.

“That’s where a lot of our focus is going to be. What kind of interventions can we put in place? What kind of supports can we put in place for those groups that have always struggled?” Elder said. “That’s nothing new, and it needs to stop. We need to start seeing those groups performing better.”

Lagging achievement among Yazzie-Martinez students is a “reflection that conditions in classrooms have not changed drastically enough to see the kinds of growth that we’d like to see,” said Loretta Trujillo, executive director of Transform Education New Mexico, which advocates for the sort of change outlined in the lawsuit.

“We’re hoping that the conditions can become much more centered around culture and identity and mental health,” she said. “When we do that, I think we’ll see that students’ … performance on these kinds of assessments will increase.”

Cathryn McGill, founder and director of the New Mexico Black Leadership Council, said helping the outcomes of African American students was about APS needing to address the root causes of their struggles, saying, “you can’t attribute it just to poverty, you’ve got to dig a little deeper.”

One of the root causes she referenced was a need for Black students to see themselves reflected more often in the schools they attend.

More representation, she said, could help provide “appropriate role models in schools who are making students see themselves reflected in the schools they go to and (providing) mentorship.”

According to district data at the end of last school year, only about 2.5% of APS staff are Black. That said, about 2.6% of students at that time were Black.

Elder still said the district is working on aligning those people to make sure Black teachers are in schools with Black students.

Even so, there are still staffing struggles, he said, which persist for other student groups. That includes educators who serve special education classrooms, such as educational assistants, who at the beginning of October, according to the district, had some 210 vacancies — apparently the most of any educator group.