It must be election year. Our governor wants to give teachers an across-the-board 7 percent raise next year. Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham is keeping the New Mexico tradition of spending like a drunk sailor in the fat years, instead of addressing our myriad problems with the largess.
One of the problems of having a Washington insider and perpetual bureaucrat leading a state and its budget is that they think throwing money at problems is the answer. Of course you’ve got to give the same raise to the bureaucrats too. So paper pushers and those working in the acronym-laden trenches would also receive 7 percent raises.
She’s quoted in the Dec. 2 Albuquerque Journal as saying she also wants to raise the minimum salaries for the three teacher tiers to $50,000, $60,000 and $70,000.
New Mexicans would pay an additional $280 million a year to fund all those raises. That is a recurring expense, not just for this year-of-plenty.
Here in the real world people receive raises when they do a good job. In the world not wastefully funded by taxpayer money doled out by incompetent politicians you must do something worthy, perhaps several things to earn a raise.
Does anyone in this state believe educators and the bloated administrations over them are doing a good job? Our position of 50th in the country in education says otherwise.
No business owner, manager or supervisor who works with a private sector budget is handing out 7 percent raises because their employees aren’t respected enough or because their nine-months-a-year job is stressful. F For-profit businesses base raises on dependability, quality of work, collaborating with co-workers, taking direction, leads when needed and customer service. How about meeting all the requirements of a contract?
Does anyone in this state believe all teachers meet some of those qualities?
That brings us to another problem with blanket raises. We know there are good teachers in the Española School District. We know a few at McCurdy. There are some exceptional teachers in these districts. They meet the above requirements. They deserve raises.
However, the majority of the teachers do not. This is evident in test scores at almost every grade level. It shows in the inability of high school students to meet minimal requirements of SAT scores.
Teachers’ jobs are to educate students in front of them and get them ready for a life of labor, military, professional career or more academia. That is not happening.
It’s really not happening for the Native American students, hence the Yazzie/Martinez case brought several years ago.
After the late Judge Sarah Singleton ruled the school Districts must do more to educate students of color, the state’s first idea was to pay teachers more money. The second idea was boost kindergarten enrollment and pre-K programs.
This is the go-to answer for most politicians when throwing good money after bad. There are studies that go both ways on how much better students perform later, after attending pre-K and kindergarten programs.
The Hail Mary was adding school days to the year and keeping cohorts of students together with their teachers. This failed miserably because teachers are not going to give up their summers to teach students who aren’t engaged the rest of the school year. Even throwing more money at them didn’t budge many schools around the state to give it a go.
Then came COVID-19, the catch all excuse for poor performance. We entered the period of “learning loss” and welcomed it with arms wide open. Students not attending in person, and when returning to in-person learning, resulted in disastrous test results locally.
Education takes up almost half our budget and we get very little payback for it. The budget grows almost every year. We keep funding education at a higher rate and percentage. We’re not getting better.
A vast majority of successful students leave the state and don’t return. Who can blame them? We should address the lack of opportunity here.
But yes, by all means give everyone a 7 percent raise and let’s not worry about what will happen when oil and gas craters again.