Residents, taxpayers and most importantly parents remain in the dark when it comes to how their local education system is working, or more accurately not working.
Anyone wanting to know how their school district or child’s school is performing have no information, data or reports to tell them if their child is being educated well or at all. Upon taking office Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham immediately did away with the letter grading system that schools were required to provide. She said it wasn’t an accurate picture of any school’s performance. We agree.
However, at least it gave parents a snapshot of some of the things their school was doing well and in which areas it lagged. It gave parents a chance to weigh-in via the annual parental survey. It provided truancy rates, graduation rates and test scores at different grades.
Because schools no longer gathered the information, in late 2019 the governor also allowed them to stop creating and distributing an annual accountability report.
Full disclosure: school districts have to pay, by law, to publish in a newspaper of general circulation an accountability report every November for the previous school year. That was one of former Gov. Bill Richardson’s ideas: gather the data and present it to the public, you know, the people paying the bills.
One of the most important pieces of information on the accountability report was it graded the individual schools within the district. There was an escalation of interventions that needed to take place if a school was annually failing or “F”. If a school had one or two, there was corrective action the state Public Education Department had to administer, three took the action up a notch and at five failing years, the school would be closed.
Lujan Grisham was quoted in early 2019 as making two questionable statements. First she said you can’t close a school, leaving parents with no school. Let’s be real and admit if a school fails five years in a row, parents didn’t have a school. It was more of a poorly run day care center.
Dulce Elementary was heading for closure in 2019. It had four Fs and had not improved. Parents there must wonder how their school is doing now, with no accountability from anyone. That school board routinely ignores requests from the local newspaper for any type of information.
Secondly Lujan Grisham said punishing the school was not the answer. Corrective action is not punishment. It was a plan that brought in training for teachers, more and better programs, help at the administration level and closer monitoring of progress. That wasn’t punishment, that was help, of sorts.
Granted, that help was coming from the Department, the last place in the state a school district should seek help. Witness McCurdy Charter School’s and the Española School District’s experience with the state taking over finances. Each was a miserable debacle in its own way, costing taxpayers millions of dollars with the real change coming from each district finally hiring a competent superintendent leading to the hiring of competent and in Española’s case two great chief financial officers back-to-back and just doing the job they were supposed to do.
Surely everyone has noticed that anything wrong in the past two years elicits the answer, “COVID-19.” Businesses can’t find employees and suppliers won’t ship, or supplies sit in ships. Veterinarians are scarce. Some products are just gone. Hours are altered. Businesses closed.
But school districts have received record amounts of funding from the state and federal levels. Every student received a laptop, Chrome, tablet, something to connect them to schools that were woefully unprepared to teach in any fashion except face-to-face. Parents were little help.
We sat in many online classroom presentations over the past year, where empty couches, chairs, ceilings were supposedly a student. Engagement was nowhere to be found.
Finally districts agreed after Christmas break 2020 that students had not learned much of anything. They all coined and profusely threw about the phrase “learning loss.” Of course to address this monumental catastrophe districts needed more money.
We’ve tried to pry from the Española School District exactly what they’ll purchase to address this learning loss. Fancy software names get tossed around at Board meetings. They mean little to nothing to the layman, nor most Board members.
Now, more than ever, each school district in the country must account to all taxpayers everywhere how they are educating students. There is a huge gap over the past year, which we’ll all pay for when these students hit eighth grade. Many won’t get past that grade because of the past year.
Any type of damage control could curtail the impending exodus but most districts are simply not up to the challenge. They lack leadership, skill and education at the administrative level where the badly needed ideas and implementation should occur.
Now, more than ever, school districts should be telling taxpayers and parents what a hot mess their child’s school is. The only problem bigger than school districts not teaching is that parents don’t seem to care.
Just get the gym floor repaired so they can watch basketball.