Big changes are underway in state government with a new governor starting to implement her vision for how to do public education in NM. The present oil and gas NM state tax revenue presents opportunities not present in previous years, and this governor has plans to use a large proportion of the additional state funds for public education projects. She is also moving to reduce the impact and prevalence of proficiency tests for students and teachers.
It remains to be seen how innovative and effective the new programs and policies will be, but there is certainly nowhere to go but up from NM’s bottom dwelling statistics re educational achievement. What would be great…if somehow Community Schools got something like the support recently given by the LAUSD.
(of interest: NM’s entire state public school enrollment and number of schools is somewhat less than LAUSD. However the demographics of the student population in both areas are surprisingly similar. Both have very high % of students classified as “Hispanic”, and relatively low % of students classified as “white”, and both have large numbers of children who live in homes at or below the “poverty line”.
Additionally, we know a significant (but uncounted) % in both regions are undocumented, who have great ESL needs…as well. . So perhaps what works in LAUSD for Community Schools can be applied in NM, and vice versa.
[gview file=”https://publicservicesalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Mission-control-Governor-announces-education-leadership-team-New-Mexico-In-Depth.pdf”]