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Saving our kids from illiteracy
Nora Espinoza
It is no secret that New Mexico’s education system is in desperate need of reform. The state’s high-school graduation rate ranks 49th in the country – only Nevada and the District of Columbia rank lower. Our kids deserve better; in fact, they deserve the best.
Last year, New Mexico spent $2.3 billion on K-12 education. That’s $11,000 per child. If throwing money at our education problems could fix them, they would be solved already. Money alone is not the answer.
To meaningfully improve K-12 education, we must spend resources wisely and couple targeted spending with commonsense education policy. If we are proactive and enact thoughtful reforms, we can dramatically improve education for New Mexico’s children.
The Limiting School Grade Promotion bill, which I have sponsored, is a bold first step toward improving our broken education system. The bill would end the destructive practice known as social promotion, which promotes children to the next grade level regardless of whether they have mastered the key skills of the previous grade.
A 2011 study conducted by Annie E. Casey Foundation noted that a student who can’t read at grade level in the 3rd grade is four times more likely to drop out of school before graduating from high school. Social promotion allows our kids to float aimlessly through the education system until they disappear into one of the cracks.
We have the responsibility to ensure that our kids are not being promoted to the fourth grade without the vital skill of reading. By ensuring that our kids can read, we give them a gift that opens up whole new worlds and allows them to excel inside and outside the classroom.
It is unconscionable to postpone improving our children’s education. I urge my colleagues in New Mexico’s Legislature to make a stand for our children. It is high time to end the status quo and send this legislation to the governor’s desk for signature before we adjourn this special session.
Espinoza, a Republican, represents District 59 in the N.M. House of Representatives.
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Ms Espinoza offers an intriguing number here: $11K a year to educate 1 child. Given that as true, a traditional 9 month school year, with an average class size of 30 students, and an average teacher salary of roughly $40K per year, yield the following numbers, which seem downright provocative.
1) What we spend to educate one child: slightly less than $60.00 a day
Put it that way, and it doesn’t seem like we’ve been “throwing money at the problem” at all, does it?
Or, does it?
2) What we pay the teacher per child: a little over $7.00 a day
That means what we pay teachers is only about one seventh of the total we pay to educate a child.
So, what do the remaining six sevenths pay for? Honestly, don’t know. Worse, I don’t know who does.
I strongly suspect no one really does. Kind of like with tax expenditures.
Seems to me that a Bill like this, as near as I can figure it , only really means to change one thing: eliminate a parents right to override a decision by a school to hold their child back for another year in 3rd grade. Unless, of course it also removes the schools opportunity to make a decision. It seems a little vague whether it actually does this, or not. Everything else seems to be included in the way things are being done already. Of course, too many kids aren’t reading at grade level, after taking the classes for that grade level. I don’t see how making these kids endure those same classes again will help. I could be wrong, but isn’t doing the same thing over, and expecting different results, definitive of something we should really want to avoid here?
But it’s the money that really bothers me. There doesn’t seem to be any. As wedum59 points out above, this will likely cost a lot. Especially if the goal is actually improve these kids reading ability by doing things more better and differently . Maybe there will be significant initial cost savings resulting from fewer, and smaller, 4th grade classes. If not, then this will just become part of that six sevenths balance of spending which is doing so much good already.
There have been seemingly legitimate concerns raised about the consequences both of retention, and social promotion. Both sides seem to be missing the point here. The problem is reading skills, or the lack of them. As I recall, I was reading at the 7th grade level when I entered the 3rd grade, which I attribute to the fact that was reading at the 3rd grade level prior to entering the school system. That I attribute to the efforts of my Great Grandmother, who began teaching me to read as soon as I showed a bit of curiosity in the subject.
In spite of that fact, I spent only a few weeks in the 3rd grade, before I was sent back to 2nd grade for the remainder of the school year. The reason given was that having transferred over the summer from a school district with different priorities, I therefore lacked certain skills deemed critical to my success in the new districts curricula. Cursive writing, and basic musical notation. Did I drop out, or fail to graduate later? Not exactly, but I was seriously non-compliant until I entered college, as a re-entry student, in my thirties. Basically, I copped one huge resentment, and was a general pain in the ass for most of the teachers, and all the administrators, I encountered through High School.
I abandoned cursive writing at my first opportunity, and was so intransigent in my refusal to learn musical sight reading that a counselor was called in, to no avail. Clearly a case of cutting off my nose to spite my face, perhaps a tragic redirection from a brilliant musical career. But, then again, I was 6-7 years old. The school officials were not, neither are the Governor and her cronies on this issue.
I will tell you now, with marvelous hindsight, that the only reason I did graduate High School, and later returned for a reasonably successful college career, was because of the efforts of a handful of humane, perceptive, and dedicated professional teachers. Those people we pay slightly more than $7.00 a day per student, or one seventh the total we spend on educating kids.
Nationally syndicated testing procedures and ostensibly well intentioned policy tweaks likes this one made absolutely no difference to the outcome of my educational experience. Hell, I deliberately tanked the the first national achievement tests, how many other kids do the same every year., do you think?
And yeah, that’s all pretty anecdotal. Statistics are nothing more, or less, than aggregates of the same. Moreover, I strongly suspect that the educational outcomes we are all concerned about will not begin to aggregate in a way we can all be proud of until we seriously change the mix of what we pay for in a child’s education. Teachers should not, in any sane country, be one seventh the cost of an education.
I would appreciate it very much if Ms. Nora Espinoza would provide us with even just a tiny bit of serious professional research that supports the claim she is sponsoring. Thanks – I’m looking forward to seeing it.
As a Father of two young students, I completely agree with Rep Espinoza’s statement that “Our kids deserve better; in fact, they deserve the best.” Beyond that, we have little agreement on this issue.
There is no, zip, zero, zilch research to support the contention that retainign students will work. To the contrarcy research shows that kids retained for a year are much more likely to drop out of school.
Education Secretary designate Skandera’s assertion that Title I funds can be used to pay for the increased costs of providing (needed, but expensive) support means that current uses of those same funds will have to be halted. Many of the supports for early reading are already in law, just not supported by resources! Additionally parents will no longer have the right to prevent a child from being retained against their wishes.
Parents and teachers understand that student retention is not a method of remediation! Ask legislators to put off this discussion until the regular legislative session in January!
Back in the stone age when I was in elementary school in NM, one of the biggest problems, obvious to anybody watching, was the number of students entering school that could not speak English very well. Not only did that set up problems with basic learning but it wasn’t much help in making the entire experience of school positive. I can clearly remember many of my neighborhood friends struggling in those early years and many never getting close to graduating.
Unfortunately I don’t think that’s changed enough and its an 800 pound PC gorilla, that no amount of money can adequately address. Sure there have been good faith efforts but with all the obstacles present, an honest identification of the problem seems like a good start.
Ms. Espinoza’s bill does nothing to help students learn how to read. What it will do is overburden third grade classrooms with these students desperately needing additional help. There is no money in the till to hire additional staff. This bill does not provide for that. Instead, we will hold back thousands of kids into classrooms already without resources. This bill makes legislators THINK they are doing something to improve education, when it does just the opposite. It is a feel-good bill for solons and the higher-ups at the Round House and PED. The mandated summer courses, paid for by the district, will only shave resources from existing programs in order to fund this unfunded mandate. This bill also presupposes that students are static and stay put in a school for sequential years, when many of the children who cannot read, and have no home resources to help them, change school locations many times during elementary school. With all the flowery talk from Ms. Espinoza, this bill makes HER feel better, but doesn’t do squat for the kid who needs one on one help to learn how to read. Packing more children into existing classrooms and making the child repeat will do nothing to further the goal of teaching the kid to read.
Why are students not reading at third grade level after completing third grade? Are they not being taught? Do teachers not know how to teach reading? Is the curriculum focused on reading? Do the kids/parents not care if they can read? Are there not enough teachers?
It seems too me the answers to these and other questions need to be answered to understand why the problem of not reading at grade level exists. Understanding “why” is required to develop a solution to the problem. This proposed bill highlights the reading problem but offers no understanding or solutions.
Teachers and administrators, what are the answers and what are the solutions?
Another unfunded mandate by the legislatures to try and make it look like they care. I agree that children should be held back if they cannot read, but there are some major problems. Abq schools current has just under 4,000 students in summer school. Under this plan that would increase to 17k according to APS policy analyst presentation to the board of education.
The bill requires 14 new “department approved assessments almost three different types of assessments per grade level up to the third grade. Where are is money going to come from to pay for the assessments?
The part of this legislation that i have the biggest problem with is that the SBA scores, the sole factor in being promoted to the third grade, are release in August, too late for students to receive summer school remediation or to retest for proficiency before being required to repeat the third grade.
OK … if eliminating social promotion isn’t the answer, what is? It isn’t money … during the Richardson administration, the state threw additional billions at education, and the results were awful – we added jobs, but didn’t improve education, and we watered down the pool of funds available to GOOD teachers by keeping poorly skilled ones and adding more overhead.
(1) This session was called specifically for redistricting. The issue of social promotion can wait until the January session.
(2) The bill as written is an unfunded mandate, read this excerpt from the Las Cruces Sun-News
(http://www.lcsun-news.com/las_cruces-news/ci_18921226):
“Money, or the lack of it, appears to be the main stumbling block to the bill ending “social promotions” – the practice of advancing kids to the next grade when they have not yet mastered basic skills.
Stan Rounds, superintendent of the Las Cruces Public School District, said neither he nor his board favor the governor’s proposed retention program, mostly because they could not afford to pay for it.
Rounds said the measure would increase costs to his district by $9.7 million, and he has not a nickel for any new program.
“The message my board had for me was simple: No more unfunded mandates,” Rounds said.
His district, with 24,500 students, is the state’s second largest. To comply with the provisions of Senate Bill 23, the education initiative being pushed by Martinez, the Las Cruces district would have to operate a summer school for up to 23 percent of its students in grades 3 to 8, Rounds said.
“That alone is a $5 million expense. We’d have to hire more teachers and take on the expense of more classrooms in summer,” he said.
The Albuquerque Public Schools, with an enrollment of more than 90,000, projected an additional $33 million in costs to comply with the bill.”
Lack of funding was the complaint about this legislation in the spring session, and it is still not being addressed. And as many others have commented on this site, holding students back is not a proven strategy. Espinoza would do well to read the other articles on this subject that have appeared on nmpolitics.net in the last 2-3 weeks. She could learn a lot from them.