EDITORIAL: State should embrace Project ECHO's literacy pledge

If someone came knocking on your door with a plan that would guarantee a better quality of life for your children, would you be interested?

The answer for many would be a resounding “yes.”

A more skeptical person might ask, “What will this cost me?”

And if they could guarantee a better future for your children and it would cost roughly 0.1% of your annual budget, you might question their credibility.

When it comes to credibility, you’d be hard pressed to find a more impressive organization than Project ECHO.

Dr. Sanjeev Arora, the founder of Project ECHO, is nothing short of an international superhero, likely helping to save the lives of millions of people around the world. And it all started right here in New Mexico.

Project ECHO got its start helping to educate health care providers in rural areas of the state and ultimately grew to provide expert health care to underserved areas across the globe.

Today, Project ECHO serves 195 countries and remains deeply rooted in New Mexico helping to guide and churn out medical experts in a number of different areas of expertise.

What Dr. Arora has accomplished sounds rather simple: He found a way to upscale human performance through mentorship.

Using the same approach, ECHO has more recently started to work on education programs, specifically related to childhood literacy.

Ultimately, ECHO has been successful in sharing knowledge. To date, 3,480 teachers have participated in Project ECHO, learning how to better teach the science of reading and boost literacy around the state.

The results have been measurable, as teachers and children are gradually gaining knowledge.

There’s so much more work to be done. It’s no secret that New Mexico has its education struggles. We are last in the nation when it comes to literacy among third-graders (only 38% of our state’s third graders read at or above a third grade level).

State leaders have been searching and working desperately to improve New Mexico’s education system. Dr. Arora and Project ECHO can help. In a massive way.

Arora said that Project ECHO is going to ask the Legislature for $5.6 million per year in funding each year for the next five years. (That’s roughly 0.1% of the state’s budget).

In return for that funding, Arora said he will guarantee that literacy will improve by 10% across the state if teachers will participate in a 1-year internship with ECHO.

ECHO staff has the internship fleshed out and insist it will be teacher-friendly, not requiring any additional time from what is already a busy day for most teachers.

A 10% increase would move New Mexico’s literacy rates far off the bottom in the nation, closer to the top two-thirds of states in the union.

It’s a good start for a state stuck in last place.

Literacy could well be the snowball that turns into an avalanche of growth and prosperity for New Mexico.

“Education is the biggest predictor or health and economic development,” Arora noted. “We think we can have a transformative effect (on the state).”

Arora believes ECHO will not only help improve literacy, but also reduce teacher burnout and improve teacher retention across the state.

“We completely believe in Gov. (Michelle Lujan Grisham)’s priority of literacy,” Arora said. “They have their own plan and we want to complement them. Everything we do, want to do to support the state. We want to help.

“There would be about 110,000 students (across the state) who will see improvement in reading. Nothing is more important than having a child read.”

We at the Journal have watched with marvel as Dr. Arora and Project ECHO have set lofty goals and surpassed them over the past decades.

Like any other consumer, we’re typically skeptical when someone offers a solution that seems too good to be true.

But if ever there was a person, and a group, that has proven their trustworthiness, it is Dr. Arora and Project ECHO.

For the future of our children and all of New Mexico, we urge our state’s leaders to open their ears and their wallets and run, not walk, into a partnership with Project ECHO to address literacy across the state.