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Feds reject NM education plan; Senate should reject its author
The Roundhouse in Santa Fe (Photo by Peter St. Cyr)
Senators need to hold Skandera accountable for her failure, and particularly her proposal to manipulate school grades to mask the degree to which schools are not doing enough to help the students most in need of improved instruction.
New Mexico senators need to bite the bullet and vote to send Hanna Skandera packing before they wind up their current legislative session.
Skandera is the non-educator Governor Martinez brought to New Mexico to be secretary of public education. She has held the position, without Senate confirmation, for more than a year.
During her unconfirmed tenure, Skandera has displayed remarkable distrust of New Mexico parents, teachers and school administrators and disdain for state laws and traditions. Now, thanks to Washington, we know that she is incompetent.
Upon arrival, Skandera disbanded the state advisory councils on Indian education, Hispanic education and bilingual education. She fired dozens of employees in the Public Education Department and brought into New Mexico highly-paid temporary consultants, one of whom lamented that N.M. student assessment rules did not permit English-only testing.
And she sent $800,000 of state funds appropriated for Indian education to a New York Organization, Teach for America, which devoted one percent of the money to recruit and train Indian teachers.
Irrefutable proof of Skandera’s unfitness to be New Mexico’s Secretary of Education was delivered last week when the U.S. Department of Education (USED) ruled on the adequacy of 11 state plans submitted to it in November for relief from some of the harshest requirements of the No Child Left Behind Act. Plans from Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, Oklahoma and Tennessee were approved by USED. Only one state plan – the New Mexico plan developed by Hanna Skandera – was rejected!
Flaws in Skandera’s plan
Letters USED sent to Skandera in December (here) and January (here) identified major problems with her plan. Although the letters are public documents, they are not displayed on the NMPED website. We have, however, read them carefully.
One reason the plan was rejected was that there was no evidence that Skandera had complied with the requirement to consult with teachers and school administrators in developing the plan. Nor was there evidence that she had “meaningfully engaged and solicited input on its request from other diverse communities, such as students, parents, community-based organizations, civil rights organizations, organizations representing students with disabilities and English Learners, business organizations and Indian tribes.”
The truth is that Skandera did not accept or even respond to offers from New Mexico education groups to assist in developing the plan. Indeed, the public had no opportunity to make input on the application since it was not posted on the NMPED website until after it was received by USED in Washington!
Even worse than the procedural problems associated with Skandera’s “I’ll-do-it-alone” approach to developing a state educational improvement and accountability plan is the substance of the plan itself. To be approved, plans had to show that the state had a clear and coherent set of strategies and programs to improve instruction and to support schools in their improvement efforts. Ten states met this standard. New Mexico did not.
The most flagrant failure of Skandera’s education plan was that it ignored the essential purpose of state plans – to boost the academic test scores and graduation rates of the student subgroups who have been historically underserved in the state’s public schools. In New Mexico, as in many other states, these student subgroups include racial and ethnic minority students, poor students, students who are learning English as a second language, and students with disabilities.
In its December and January letters to Skandera, the USED pointedly noted that the plan’s accountability and support system “does not utilize subgroups and does not include interventions for subgroups, particularly English Learners and students with disabilities, based on achievement, graduation rates, or performance and progress.” Even after two warnings, Skandera failed to come up with a plan for addressing the needs of the student subgroups that should be a central focus of state plans.
Statistical chicanery
Why did Skandera persist in ignoring these student subgroups in developing her educational accountability and support plan? Because she had another way of dealing with student subgroups – the manipulation of test scores.
In the December and January letters to Skandera, USED raised a red flag about her “use of conditioned school status estimates in the school grading model and the transparency of these estimates for parents and educators.” What USED found objectionable was a complex formula, buried in the attachments to the state’s plan, to determine a school’s report card grade by adjusting them on the basis of student race, ethnicity, family income, native language, and disabilities.
This statistical sleight of hand mocks the “transparency” of the new “simplified” grade A-F state school report card. While the formula is incomprehensible to most college graduates, its intended effect is clear: to compensate statistically for the “social characteristics” often associated with low academic performance.
This is an unconscionable example of what has been termed “the soft bigotry of low expectations.” The formula institutionalizes and legitimizes lower expectations for children of color, poor children, children who speak a language other than English at home. In so doing, Skandera’s plan violates the central purpose of NCLB and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. It also violates all civil rights law applicable to education and quite likely, the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.
This statistical chicanery belies a perspective that has no place in public education, but especially in New Mexico, where 70 percent of the state’s students are classified as racial or ethnic “minorities,” where proportionately more children are poor than in any of the other 50 states, and where nearly one-third of all children start school speaking a language other than English.
No cabinet post is more important to NM’s future
New Mexico senators need to heed last week’s message from Washington about Skandera’s education reform plan. The chief education officials in 10 other states submitted acceptable plans to improve to improve public education. Skandera’s plan was rejected.
Senators need to hold Skandera accountable for her failure, and particularly her proposal to manipulate school grades to mask the degree to which schools are not doing enough to help the students most in need of improved instruction. At worst, her idea is the product of personal prejudice. At best, it is a cunning deception to produce an illusion that her policies have brought about a dramatic improvement in school performance.
In the few remaining days of this legislative session, Senators should vote on Skandera’s nomination. They should reject her and urge the governor to appoint a capable educational leader who can lead our schools forward.
No state cabinet post is more important to New Mexico’s future. The quality of New Mexico’s system of public education will determine whether our youth can compete with those in other states and countries, whether our businesses will prosper or wither, and whether the quality of life in our communities improves or declines.
Briseño is executive director of the New Mexico Association for Bilingual Education in Clovis. Lyons is a civil-rights attorney in Arlington, Virginia.
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As a bi-lingual Republican, Briseño and Lyons have gotten my attention with this thought-provoking article. Do not believe the bunk conservatives try to sell you that your children are not properly educated unless they are educated in English. Your children are not properly educated unless they can speak at least two languages. Monoglots are at an extreme disadvantage in the world of the future. I will carefully observe what this administration does going forward.
IP I am not blaming bilingualism for anything. I am happy if individuals are bi-lingual…I have a child that is multilingual, and English was not her first language.
But at least I got you thinking about the issue of efficient allocation of scarece financial resources for education.
IP I grew up in a house where family members did not have English as the primary language. The first thing they did was learn the languge and try to assimilate into the USA. They did not loose their traditions..or their culture. For private conversations they would converse in the language of the old country.
Oh by the way I would not presume that English is your first language either…That would not be pollitically correct.
MJM:
Are you seriously blaming bilingualism for both our educational difficulties (something that is actually the opposite of reality) and our budgetary shortfalls? Really? And you wonder why no one takes seriously any of your completely illogical statements or questions with absolutely no reasonable premises? You clearly don’t understand the discussion if you are asking why we are “mandating” something which no one has proposed as a universal requirement. For that matter, if you have “traveled much of the world” and somehow came out with the impression that there are no other countries that mandate multiple languages, then you clearly traveled with both your eyes and ears firmly shut. Let us set aside the fact that one of the many areas this country is falling behind in educational quality is linguistics, because almost everyone else mandates second language instruction at very young ages (when the linguistic centers of the brain are still in development) as opposed to when the student if fourteen and has more trouble learning such things; there are quite simply the legal realities of the world. We are, in fact, one of the only countries in the entire world that does not mandate government and public business be conducted in multiple languages, and the majority of our compatriots are either Arabic-speaking countries or fairly insignificant former colonies of the England and France. Certainly we are absolutely in the minority when it comes to having the bulk of our populace being hopelessly monolinguistic.
Finally, in response to the question, “can you tell me how many other states have a constitutional mandate that names more than one official language?” Oregon, Washington, and Rhode Island all have linguistic non-discrimination clauses, and Hawaii has two official languages. Ten seconds of research could have answered that question for you.
Calm down IP…My question is serious. If we mandate a system that requires teaching on a bi-lingual basis doesn’t that come at an additional cost to the general population? You know IP that our state budget for education is quite large. If we mandate that the curriculum be taught in both english and spanish does that make for the most efficient allocation of resources? I believe that education is largest budget item. So if we ask people to converse in english..a language recognized in the USA as our primary form of communication, should that not be a less costly solution? Perhaps we could use funds for other social services? Having traveld quite a bit in the world I know of no country that mandates that multiple languages be spoken, though I must admit that english seems to be a language spoken by many individuals. I know in India there are many regional languages, but English is soken by most individuals. Now IP can you tell me how many other states have a constitutional mandate that names more than one official language? How are their economies doing? Do they spend as much per capita for education as we do in NM? Do they rank higher or lower on educational testing standards?
MJM:
I didn’t answer your question because, as I pointed out, your question is ludicrous; just because you don’t understand something and make wild unrelated leaps of imagination does not men that your fantasies are the “logical conclusion” to an argument that you’ve made no effort to comprehend. Accommodating a few hundred people – who also happen to speak English already – in their second language is in no way the “logical conclusion” to equal treatment of nearly half the state in a language that, for many of us, is our first.
IP you make it all sound so, so Utopian….At the end of the day you never answered my question…Who is going to pay for our Noah’s Ark strategy of teaching both in English and Spanish? Do you think this double standard approach comes at no cost?
I hate to break up the hatefest over the not-from-here Secretary-designate, as instigated by the not-from-here hit team that wrote the piece. I’m curious as to who paid them and why?
I’m not trying to defend Hanna and am admittedly not qualified to comment on education policy. However, I smell the guardians of the status quo here, and I’m curious what are we going to do to improve? I know the historical approach is to simply throw more money at the failed system, and it will get better – but of course it never has. My former public school classmates, who now teach in my old NM public schools and at others, tell me repeatedly that it’s worse than I remember (which wasn’t that bad), and graduation rates and test scores seem to bear that out. So, not only is our establishment and status quo not helping, it’s making things worse. So, aside from shovelling cash into the blast furnace, which I suspect would be the establishments first suggestions, I’d love to hear some concrete ideas worth trying to actually make things better. Unfortunately, that’s when the room gets quiet. The only good news is they literally can’t possibly get that much worse.
Dr. J is right, Sen Lopez needs to do her job and give Hanna a hearing so we can all move on.
This song pretty much sums up the education system goals of Ms. Hanna Skandera. Here is Pete Seeger singing Tom Paxton’s satirical song – What Did You Learn in School Today!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krMWGw5Vb04
Well first of all, someone should clarify that there are no Tiwa speakers – the language is dead (were you thinking Tewa or Towa, perhaps?). Secondly, I deal with plenty of people who prefer Spanish; for that matter, over 43% of New Mexicans speak the language, and choosing to hide behind Jingoistic clichés doesn’t change reality, nor does using the word “logic” to cover up the fact that you (intentionally?) don’t understand someone else’s statements so that you can misrepresent them by projecting your own unwarranted fears.
We’ve been governing this state bilingually for a century now, and it hasn’t been a problem; for that matter, students in bilingual education programs typically score higher than there monolinguistic peers, so arguing against clearly doesn’t stem from a desire to improve our educational system; indeed, arguments against bilingualism in this country frequently border on attempts at cultural elimination. Are you perhaps worried that you’ll not be able to comprehend the arguments of people with the sense to disagree with you in two languages, rather than simply the one you habitually fail to comprehend currently?
IP thanks for your providing this information. You are so right..just spot on… about the NM Constitution…circa 1912…I wonder what the % of Hispanics in NM was at that time IP? Care to guess?.
So how many contracts that you deal with are in Spanish IP? Do you think that having to teach for both Spanish and English students in NM is not without additional cost IP? I think what ever language we use requires that the student be proficient..dont you?
If I use your logic IP perhaps we need to have all of the Native Americans taught in their native languages too. Don’t you agree? I mean they were here first. Perhaps we all need to learn Navajo. Tiwa or other Native American dialects.
Realistically, we can not afford the “Noah’s Ark” educational strategy that Bi-lingual educators support. Do we really need two of everthing? Isn’t English considered the primary language of the USA IP? Perhaps it might be time for us to amend our constitution to make English our primary language. But since bi-lingual languages are a big welfare program for educators I doubt that will ever happen. God forbid we spend that money on math, science and other technical areas.
MJM:
If you’re going to invoke the word “Constitutionally” after making a wildly uneducated statement about language usage, you might want to actually read the New Mexico Constitution… and, for that matter, US law. There is no national language in the United States. Period. Indeed, English-only laws have been ruled unconstitutional twice in the past quarter-century alone. New Mexico’s Constitution, on the other, specifically names two official languages; English and Spanish. In short, your assumption that we should all speak English is not only an affront to New Mexicans, it’s actually an affront to the legal- and historical-traditions of the United States itself.
Mr. Briesno. Is NM not a state in the USA Sir? Is English not the language spoken in the USA Sir? Yes I know we are a border state and hispanics are actually a majority in the State..But do we need to become even more distant frm most of the rest of this country? English shuld be the primary language and Spanish an elective. If we continue to have Spanish spoken or demanded as the same as English how can we justify this? Economically and Constitutionally?
To the extent Skandera is closing down further efforts to address the needs of groups of kids instead their individual needs, she is doing good work. The goal of education is to create lifelong independent learners; nothing is gained by grouping them first, by anything else but their individual learning capacity, before beginning to identify and mitigate their the obstacles between them and reaching their full potential.
Ms. Skandera received a D for her poor work in the school system. The report card survey was sent to 88 of the 89 school district superintendents or interim-superintendents with a good return of 51%.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/81468381/Skandera-Report-Card-02-10-12
Our children deserve better than this inexperienced “D” rated administrator who appears to have a disdain for New Mexico’s multicultural society. The state legislature should reject her appointment ASAP.
Here is video on Ms. Skandera and her indifference to New Mexico’s bi-lingual and multi-cultural education law and issues.
http://nmabe.net/2012/02/video-hanna-skandera-and-minority-education-a-bad-mix/
re;
Sec Skandera and her PIO Larry Behrens weres asked to produce the final reports of those highly-paid consultants more than a month ago, and still have not produced them.
Secretary Skandera’s problem is not her lack of actual teaching experience, it is her lack of respect for actual teaching experience.
I wouldn’t be surprised to find a million years of actual teaching experience in this state; and no seat at the table where decisions are made.
Here is a classic song for Ms. Skandera by the Moody Blues:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pS3ixmsQgCk
I think it is time to “Go Now”!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Just one more example, if we needed more, that our governor has made some very big mistakes in appointments. Get rid of Skandera. She was never fitted for the job. From what I’ve heard around Las Cruces, Martinez managed the DA’s office in a less than efficient manner. She got elected on an anti-Richardson platform, not on her own merit. If she and her right-wing allies – and money -had not painted Denish as complicit with Richardson, Denish would be our governow. (Although Denish ran a rather lackluster campaign, I have to admit.)
Obviously these authors (one from Virginia) are a wee bit biased. But I agree with part of their conclusion, she deserves a hearing and an up or down vote, so Ms. Lopez, get to work and do your job, it has been a year and you have done nothing.
Don’t waste your time and energy on the confirmation! She will leave once the Republician Presidential Nominee is selected to be his Senior Advisor on Education. Hurry up and leave Skandera!!!
Ms. Skandera is doing a terrible job. New Mexico is the only state not to get a waiver from the failed “No Child Left Behind Act.” Her application was poorly prepared. Enough is enough!