{"id":36612,"date":"2012-02-13T05:45:16","date_gmt":"2012-02-13T12:45:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nmpolitics.net\/index\/?p=36612"},"modified":"2012-02-13T11:04:28","modified_gmt":"2012-02-13T18:04:28","slug":"feds-reject-nm-education-plan-senate-should-reject-its-author","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/2012\/02\/feds-reject-nm-education-plan-senate-should-reject-its-author\/","title":{"rendered":"Feds reject NM education plan; Senate should reject its author"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"The<\/a>

The Roundhouse in Santa Fe (Photo by Peter St. Cyr)<\/p><\/div>\n

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.<\/h4>\n

New Mexico senators need to bite the bullet and vote to send Hanna Skandera<\/a> packing before they wind up their current legislative session.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

And she sent $800,000 of state funds appropriated for Indian education to a New York Organization, Teach for America<\/a>, which devoted one percent of the money to recruit and train Indian teachers.<\/p>\n

Irrefutable proof of Skandera\u2019s unfitness to be New Mexico\u2019s 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 \u2013 the New Mexico plan developed by Hanna Skandera \u2013 was rejected<\/a>!<\/p>\n

Flaws in Skandera\u2019s plan<\/h3>\n

Letters USED sent to Skandera in December (here<\/a>) and January (here<\/a>) 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.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cmeaningfully 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

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!<\/p>\n

Even worse than the procedural problems associated with Skandera\u2019s \u201cI\u2019ll-do-it-alone\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

The most flagrant failure of Skandera\u2019s education plan was that it ignored the essential purpose of state plans \u2013 to boost the academic test scores and graduation rates of the student subgroups who have been historically underserved in the state\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

In its December and January letters to Skandera, the USED pointedly noted that the plan\u2019s accountability and support system \u201cdoes 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.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

Statistical chicanery<\/h3>\n

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 \u2013 the manipulation of test scores.<\/p>\n

In the December and January letters to Skandera, USED raised a red flag about her \u201cuse of conditioned school status estimates in the school grading model and the transparency of these estimates for parents and educators.\u201d What USED found objectionable was a complex formula, buried in the attachments to the state\u2019s plan, to determine a school\u2019s report card grade by adjusting them on the basis of student race, ethnicity, family income, native language, and disabilities.<\/p>\n

This statistical sleight of hand mocks the \u201ctransparency\u201d of the new \u201csimplified\u201d 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 \u201csocial characteristics\u201d often associated with low academic performance.<\/p>\n

This is an unconscionable example of what has been termed \u201cthe soft bigotry of low expectations.\u201d 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

This statistical chicanery belies a perspective that has no place in public education, but especially in New Mexico, where 70 percent of the state\u2019s students are classified as racial or ethnic \u201cminorities,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

No cabinet post is more important to NM\u2019s future<\/h3>\n

New Mexico senators need to heed last week\u2019s message from Washington about Skandera\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

In the few remaining days of this legislative session, Senators should vote on Skandera\u2019s nomination. They should reject her and urge the governor to appoint a capable educational leader who can lead our schools forward.<\/p>\n

No state cabinet post is more important to New Mexico\u2019s future. The quality of New Mexico\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Brise\u00f1o is executive director of the New Mexico Association for Bilingual Education<\/a> in Clovis. Lyons is a civil-rights attorney in Arlington, Virginia.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

New Mexico senators need to bite the bullet and vote to send Hanna Skandera packing before they wind up their current legislative session.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2582,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1192,16],"tags":[125,107],"class_list":["post-36612","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-commentary","category-guest-columns","tag-education","tag-roundhouse"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36612","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2582"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36612"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36612\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36612"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36612"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36612"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}