It's been 5 years since a judge found New Mexico wasn't serving all students. How far has the state come?

Where did New Mexico see itself five years ago?

For many advocates, the hope was the state wouldn’t still be bringing up the rear of education in the country.

July 20 marked the five-year anniversary of a judge’s landmark decision in the consolidated Yazzie-Martinez lawsuit finding New Mexico wasn’t fulfilling its constitutional duty to provide all of its students a sufficient education — especially when it comes to those who are most “at risk.”

But despite over $1 billion in additional state funds being poured into New Mexico schools, the four groups singled out in the decision — Indigenous students, economically disadvantaged students, English learners and those with disabilities — are still among the furthest behind.

“We’re still at the bottom, nationally,” Wilhelmina Yazzie, one of the original plaintiffs in the lawsuit, told the Journal. “Our students are still struggling, very much so, especially the four groups that we are fighting for in our lawsuit.”

“Sometimes it just leaves me speechless, because we’re going on five years,” she added.

In statewide proficiency assessments, as well as on The Nation’s Report Card, Yazzie-Martinez students, who represent the majority of all New Mexico students, tended to lag behind the rest of the state last school year.

Of course, it’s not as though New Mexico, along with much of the nation, didn’t suffer some unpredictable academic setbacks over the course of the last five years — the most notable of which being the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Today, post-pandemic, we are dealing with a different set of challenges,” Deputy Education Secretary Candice Castillo, who’s taken the lead on New Mexico’s response to the lawsuit in recent weeks, told the Journal.

“We can see the progress that has been made. But all the outcomes that we know these investments and these efforts are going to bring — it’s not going to happen in three or five years,” she added. “But the structural changes that (are) needed to ensure that our education system does transform to a more equitable one (are) there.”

But the fact that Yazzie-Martinez students are struggling perhaps more than they ever have — in fact, they tended to fall further behind on The Nation’s Report Card last year from 2019 — helps demonstrate the state’s failure to support some of its most challenged students, Yazzie said.

“That’s really no excuse, because we should already have been prepared … (to) help our children not fall behind or not be retained, not lose out on credits to graduate, those types of things,” Yazzie said.

Still falling short

Of course, test scores don’t tell the full picture, because students with disabilities, English learners, Indigenous students and those who are economically disadvantaged all tend to face unique hurdles that other students may not.

But just about all of them, advocates and officials say, continue to have unmet needs.

Students with disabilities still don’t all have access to the special education services they need. Indigenous students especially fell behind during the pandemic because they didn’t have the educational resources, including broadband or nearby libraries, to keep up — and in many cases, still don’t. All teachers don’t necessarily have the preparation needed when they almost inevitably have an English learner in their classroom.

“Students still face shortages of teachers, high quality classroom environments, and adequate health and social services to support their academic and socio-emotional needs,” New Mexico Center on Law and Poverty attorney Melissa Candelaria said in a written statement. “Many students, especially in rural and tribal areas, still lack access to high-speed internet at home to do their schoolwork.”

New Mexico has taken steps to address many of those concerns, Castillo and Education Secretary Arsenio Romero pointed out, even if it may take some time to see the fruits of that labor.

Some of those steps include: Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham’s creation by executive order of a special education office in part aimed at closing gaps in students’ access to special education; installing hundreds of miles of fiber optic cables for high speed internet in remote areas; and using programs such as teacher residencies to help train Native language and teachers for English learners.

Still, one of New Mexico’s most impactful problems is its persisting struggles with educator vacancies, Legislative Education Study Committee Deputy Director John Sena said.

In its annual October vacancy report, New Mexico State University’s Southwest Outreach Academic Research Evaluation and Policy Center, known as SOAR, placed the state’s overall educator vacancy count at 1,344. In 2019, the year after the Yazzie-Martinez decision, that number was 290 educators lower.

That said, the number of vacancies across the state spiked during the pandemic, in 2021 reaching 1,727 vacancies, meaning the ensuing year’s count marked progress in filling educator ranks.

Still, Sena and LESC Director Gwen Perea Warniment said, strengthening New Mexico’s educator workforce is a prerequisite to improving outcomes for students.

“Obviously, proficiency rates is huge. But if we don’t have a high quality teacher in every classroom, is it fair to expect that we’re going to have increasing proficiency rates?” Sena said.

New Mexico, as with the rest of the country, does have significant teacher vacancies, Castillo said. But increases in teacher salaries helped close that gap last year, she pointed out.

The state’s vacancy count was cut by almost 360 teachers between NMSU’s 2021 and 2022 SOAR reports.

The PED also hasn’t provided a satisfactory or strong accountability system for tracking New Mexico’s progress on the lawsuit, some said, to include monitoring spending on underserved students.

“There is a lack of systematic accountability for how new money for at-risk students is being used,” Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund attorney Ernest Herrera, lead counsel for the Martinez plaintiffs, told the Journal. “That is a problem on PED’s end in terms of following the court’s judgment.”

In a written response to follow-up questions, department spokeswoman Kelly Pearce pointed out the PED maintains an online financial transparency portal that shows how much in state funding goes to specific types of programs in districts.

The PED also conducts visits in districts to make sure the spending of at-risk funding is having impacts within classrooms, she said.

“We are all in the process of recovering from the adjustments that we made to and for education over the last two school years,” Pearce wrote in an email. “We are continuously improving our accountability model to ensure it is robust.”

Bottom lines

Plaintiffs in the lawsuit just recently completed the discovery phase of the litigation to determine if the state has complied with court orders in the lawsuit, attorneys separately told the Journal.

While they didn’t say what the next steps in the case would be, both were clear — New Mexico hasn’t met the edicts of the court.

“What became clear through this process is that children are still not getting the educational opportunities that will set them on a productive and successful life course,” Candelaria, also legal counsel for the Yazzie plaintiffs, said.

“New Mexico’s children cannot afford to wait another five years for the state to fulfill its promise and obligation of ensuring a quality education for the most vulnerable and disadvantaged children,” she added.

Last year, the PED released a draft action plan laying out targets for academic achievement for Yazzie-Martinez students as well as efforts the state has in motion to help them.

After feedback from the public, some of whom criticized the plan for failing to describe a step-by-step, measurable roadmap for the future, the department said it would release a reworked version in the fall.

But that final draft never came, in part, Romero said, because it’s taking more time to put together than originally thought.

“I’d rather … make sure that we are doing this work in a way that we (know) what the goals are ahead of us, we know who’s responsible for what, we know what actionable items are going to take place when and then … be able to put measures in place,” he said.

Romero said a final draft of the PED’s Yazzie-Martinez action plan will be published in the fall.

In the meantime, no one’s denying that New Mexico has made some progress.

Last year, lawmakers approved average $10,000 minimum salary raises to teachers. This year, they achieved what Perea Warniment described as a consensus agreement on a long-debated issue — how to increase instructional time in schools.

Romero and Castillo pointed to both measures as ways to address some of New Mexico’s most impactful educational problems, citing the latter as a wholesale way of helping all New Mexico students.

But addressing the needs of Yazzie-Martinez students doesn’t fall exclusively on the shoulders of the state’s education department, Romero said, because it in fact takes a village — the early childhood department, higher education department, and Children, Youth and Families Department included — to do fully.

But while some have said that more progress should have been made in five years, Romero pointed out that this is just the beginning of a decades-long effort to improve academic outcomes in New Mexico.

“Kids are better off today than they were five years ago. But I also want to say that they’re going to continue to have better outcomes, better environments, and better learning opportunities as time goes on,” he said. “We’re just at the very beginning of the story.”