Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham visited Española on Sept. 8, Northern New Mexico College, specifically. She held what was labeled a roundtable discussion with local politicians and hand-selected students who have benefited from the governor’s Opportunity Scholarship fund.
Poo-poo the governor’s COVID-19 response, mask mandates and decimated small town economies if you want, but she’s thrown a boatload of money at education. Well actually at pre-K and college scholarships. The donut hole in education (K-12) still sucks up half of New Mexico’s $7 billion budget but we can’t seem to get most students ready for college.
The governor’s Opportunity Scholarship was supposed to be a $26 million fund in 2019, that money supplied from the general fund. Instead lawmakers allocated $17 million. In June 2020 that was cut to $5 million as COVID-19 took a firm grip on the state.
Our first reaction of her talk of the fund in early 2019 was, “What about the Lottery Scholarship fund?” That statewide scholarship is funded at $63.5 million this fiscal year. According to the New Mexico Higher Education Department that is a 30 percent increase from FY 2021 funding of $43 million. Where did that 30 percent come from? The general fund.
The Lottery Scholarship will pay 100 percent of all eligible students’ college tuition. To qualify for the Lottery Scholarship, students must enroll at a college or university in New Mexico within 16 months of high school graduation, attend full time, and achieve and maintain a minimum 2.5 Grade Point Average, starting in their first semester.
That pretty much covers all graduating high school seniors who have the grades and motivation to go to college. There is also the Bridge Scholarship to help those in the first year, who don’t (yet) qualify for the Lottery Scholarship.
The governor’s Opportunity Scholarship pays what those two scholarships don’t. We’re not sure what those costs could be.
The Opportunity Scholarship is more helpful to those who didn’t go straight to college or exceeded that 16 month gap between high school and college. Fair enough, but shouldn’t taxpayers be helping those ready to go to college and transitioning to that life, instead of someone changing careers or choosing college after a life of indecision?
And now, how about those students coming out of high school “ready” for college? One of the first things the governor did when she took office was eliminate the grading system for schools, stopped accountability to parents and left no way for them to find out what kind of school their child attended.
Right behind that was COVID-19 and remote learning, a disaster upon which educators, administrators, school boards and the governor keep trying to put lipstick. It was a miserable failure and the model we’re in now is marginally better.
But no one knows how poorly students are currently performing because there is no true measurement. Online courses with quizzes or tests where a student is sitting at home (or just letting his or her computer attend) in no way measures a student’s absorption of the little material dispersed last school year.
The far left like to complain about school Districts not living up to the court ruling in the Yazzi/Martinez lawsuit. They want more money thrown at education. Yet we don’t know what districts are doing to improve education with the money they’re given. Our money.
We know they’re buying trucks and score boards and fixing sports fields and putting on new roofs, changing drainage and giving teachers raises double of what the state mandated, while their performance has not been evaluated in any meaningful way.
We are one of the poorest states in the country and we are number three in education spending per capita. We are the worst state in the country for educating students. We spend a lot of money on education. Much of it is wasted because no one in control has any idea how to improve teaching students.
Someone better figure it out soon. Because these high schoolers “graduating” now are ill-prepared to get their free college education gifted to them by their governor.