Fixing an Expensive, Under-performing Education System in NM
As usual there is a flurry of discussion about fixing education as a new administration begins. Some voices incorrectly equate spending with improvement. Some want to do away with symbolic nuisances like the PARCC tests. Some want to focus on a narrow sliver of the whole, such as early childhood education. Eventually all the voices get converted into votes on real bills and we tend to prejudge future performance on what got passed and seldom check later to seeif things improve as promised.
Aware of
public concern, the last three governors generated reassuring talking points
about improving the poor quality of public education in New Mexico.
But they didn't do much about it.
Governor Johnson promoted taxpayer-funded school
vouchers for private education and we ended up with a batch of charter schools.
Two decades later they perform no better, as
a whole, than public schools.
Governor
Richardson raised teacher salaries 50% and was named Education Governor of the
Year by the NEA.
But when he left office
student performance had not improved.
Governor Martinez withdrew the carrot Richardson offered in hiking teacher
salaries--for the stick of shaming poorly performing schools by revealing their
"grades."
Student performance
did not improve.
New Mexico still
competes with Mississippi and Alabama as the lowest performing school system in
the country.
Performance in math and English rank NM at 48.
We are surrounded by states that outperform
NM in schooling--Arizona, Utah, Colorado, Oklahoma, and Texas--
in each of which dollar expenditures per
pupil are significantly lower than
ours. Wanna check?
(1) Surrounding states score higher: https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/profiles/stateprofile?chort=1&sub=MAT&sj=&sfj=NP&st=MN&year=2017R3 (2) Spending per student: http://www.governing.com/gov-data/education-data/state-education-spending-per-pupil-data.html
We
can improve schools.
Gadsden School District--low income parents, with
37% English Language Learners--moved within five years from the bottom of the
89 NM school districts up to the top third.
A new superintendent implemented a "no excuses" policy at all
levels, and it worked.
Other districts improved,
and other states have moved up the ranks.
If a governor were willing to keep track of progress and advocate
"no excuses" she could make a difference.
Higher
education is also overpriced and under-performing.
Washington
Monthly, a respected magazine that ranks colleges, calculated in 2018 that
out of 14 research institutions in the surrounding states (not counting UT
Austin) UNM ranked only eighth in research dollars, and NMSU twelfth. Worse, in
the category of "social mobility" (efforts to recruit and retain
low-income populations) UNM ranked eleventh and NMSU thirteenth.
UTEP ranks fifth.
NMSU's math and engineering departments used
to rank regularly in the top thirty, nationwide.
Today they have slipped out of sight in
national rankings. At UNM Archaeology and Latin American Studies were in the
top ten.
No more.
Money?
In sheer dollars per full time student (FTE) NM
ranks a robust ninth among states.
In each of the surrounding states higher
education spending per FTE is significantly lower than in New Mexico.
Arizona and Colorado, with better universities, spend one-third and one
half, respectively, of what New Mexico spends per FTE!
(1)
Washington Monthly Rankings:
https://washingtonmonthly.com/2018college-guide?ranking=2018-rankings-national-universities.
(2) https://nsf.gov/statistics/state-indicators/indicator/state-support-for-higher-education-per-fte-student
As Secretary
of Higher Education during Governor Martinez' first term I worked with college
presidents to create a new funding formula that would reward graduating more
students, more STEM degrees, and more low-income students. We were grossly overproducing criminal
justice majors, social workers, and teachers while grossly under-producing
graduates in STEM-related fields. Hispanics
and Natives were lagging. They comprise
60% of our population so we can't afford not
to do a better job if we want a trained workforce. The legislature, however, responding to
vested interests, funded the formula only at 3%. The rest of the higher education budget was
simply doled out proportionately to each institution's appropriation the year
before. Five years later, in 2018 formula
funding was up to 4%--not nearly enough to change the behavior of managers, a
fact consistent with falling rankings. And
with independent boards governing each institution, no system exists to promote statewide goals. All too often regents with arbitrary agendas
bicker endlessly on minor issues, seldom challenging top management priorities. A statewide board, setting statewide goals,
would help. Politically difficult? Yes, pero
si se puede.
In 1960 New
Mexico ranked 17th among states in the proportion of residents with a high
school degree.
By 2015 it had dropped to
44.
In 1990 New Mexico ranked 22 in the
proportion of residents with at least a Bachelor's degree.
In 2010 it ranked 37, and in 2015 it ranked
42.
UNM was once competitive in research
with Arizona State, Utah, Texas A&M, and Colorado State:
no more, and UTEP is catching up fast.
While there are pockets of excellence here
and there, the overall story is one of decline.
Some students are already voting with their feet.
(1) High School: for
1990-2000-2010 see http://proximityone.com/edattain.htm;
for 2015 see NCHEMS, http://www.higheredinfo.org/dbrowser/?level=nation&mode=graph&state=0&submeasure=237.
(2) Bacchelor's Degree or Above: for 1990-2000-2010 see :
http//proximityone.com/edattain.htm
Over 60% of
our state tax dollars go to education. Citizens,
media, and legislators need urgently to place comprehensive education reform high
on the agenda for incoming Governor Lujan Grisham. Given the power of vested interests, improving
education will require strong advocates, not just reassuring sound bites.
