Editor's note: This is part two of a four-part series examining the plight of education in New Mexico. Read part one here.
I was once a guest lecturer in one of New Mexico’s better high schools. While I was struggling to hold the students’ attention, several boys and girls had their heads buried in computers. In the back of the room, a couple kissed passionately. In the front, a boy boldly ran his hand up the naked thigh of the girl sitting next to him. Several students drifted casually in an out of the classroom. Meanwhile, the regular teacher sat quietly to one side while a girl plaited her hair. At least her volunteer hairdresser seemed professional.
In a journalism class that I taught for a while, I engaged the class with the idea of doing investigative projects of their own choosing. As the term progressed, the students became more and more excited about doing real reporting and more and more involved in the class. I felt they were learning valuable lessons about how to do research, how to organize it and how to write it up. But when the students turned their investigative eye on the school itself, the principal simply shut down the course.
Almost everyone agrees that many schools in New Mexico are not good enough and that many students do not receive the education they need and deserve. But that’s where agreement stops. Who is at fault for educational failure? What should be done about it? How can the system be reformed?
A friend of mine who is involved in trying to improve education in New Mexico, at both the university and high school level, believes in reform, works for reform and preaches reform. I started researching these articles in part because of his encouragement, or perhaps I should say incitement. Yet he admits, “Reform has not always worked out as intended and some reforms may have made matters worse.”
Take No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, Common Core, teacher evaluations, student testing, third grade retention, smaller classes, smaller schools and spending more money, to pick on a few of the many education panaceas that liberals or conservatives have advocated over the years.
Or take charter schools, a reform that he and I and lots of others passionately believe in. The attraction of charter schools to parents who feel ill served by the public schools is obvious. The more difficult the educational challenge, the more charter schools have prospered. Probably the greatest educational challenges are faced by middle schools, where kids are just entering puberty and are supposed to—but frequently cannot—begin to absorb specialized subjects at a relatively sophisticated level. As a consequence, Albuquerque Public Schools alone lost nearly 1,000 middle school students in the 2012-2013 school year, many (but not all) of them to charters.
Charter schools have enormous virtues. They allow schools to get around traditional obstacles posed by school boards, education departments, teacher's unions and large, generic one-size fits-all schools. They define their own mission and create curricula and classrooms to serve that mission, with smaller student bodies and teachers selected for their relevant experience, training, skills and temperament. The schools are independent of most of the requirements of the local and state education bureaucracy. A charter principal has the authority of a school system superintendent. Charters have their own independent administration—and funding.
And that is the stye in the eye: funding. Charter schools are financed out of the public purse. The money comes from the general education budget. Each charter student in New Mexico, like each ordinary public school student in the state, is allotted a certain amount of dollars from the state education budget, with additional dollars for each special needs child and some special programs. This funding is on the order of $10,000 a student and is controlled by school districts and charter schools.
The problem is that charter schools and ordinary public schools are playing a zero-sum game forced on them by the New Mexico Legislature, the governor and the Public Education Department. Every dollar that goes to charter schools comes out of the budget of regular public schools. They have to compete for those dollars.
Thus many supporters of public schools have come to resent charters for depleting their already inadequate resources. At the same time, many charter schools feel they are treated unfairly in comparison to regular public schools. A large study published by the University of Arkansas, which included 81 charter schools in New Mexico, found that on a per capita basis New Mexico charters receive 6.1 percent less than other public schools, $10,363 versus $11,008. Moreover the Legislative Education Study Committee proposes eliminating the small school size adjustment fund for charters, but not other public schools. Most charter schools are quite small and qualify for the fund, which contributes $28.18 million.
If a separate fund had been set up for charters, then this precious reform could have been supported rather than resisted by teachers, parents and administrators in traditional public schools. In other words, the funding formula created a war.
Slipping into such a war was as easy as sledding down a snowy mountain. In New Mexico, each school district used to pay its own way. But in the name of equality, federal courts across the country started ruling that having districts inhabited by wealthy residents spend far more than poor districts could afford was unconstitutional.
The solution (by the way, devised in the 1970s by a very conservative state senator named Aubrey Dunn, the father of the land commissioner candidate of the same name currently involved in a recount for state office), was to centralize spending at the state level, with a specified amount of money going to each district in proportion to the number of students it had. This state funding formula replaced local property taxes and was supplemented by federal funds for special education, school lunches and some other programs. Then several years ago, a federal district court ruled that the constitution’s guarantee of equal protection of the laws also prohibited districts from spending drastically unequal sums on school construction, so that program too is now financed at the state level, with those districts with the worst problems (usually the poorest districts) having priority.
The funding formulas the state applied to public school operations and construction were then extended to charter schools, with per-student spending equally affecting charters and traditional schools. And there you have it—the war of the bucks in classrooms across the state.
Centralizing spending decisions had another impact on schools. In theory, the state operates under a voluntary restraint that prohibits it from requiring individual districts to adopt specific policies. The districts are supposed to get the money and then spend it as local priorities dictate. In practice, however, power, as always, follows the money. The state attaches to its appropriations “recommendations” on how the districts should spend the money, and woe be to any district that ignores these theoretically voluntary guidelines.
Is it better for the state or the districts to control educational policies? Are uniformity and equality superior to tradition and grassroots? You can get an argument on that any time day or night. But two things are clear. One is that just as education has become a war between charters and traditional schools, so it has led to a battle between the districts and the state. What is also clear is that power has shifted from the districts to the state, like it or not.
Similarly, ever since the federal government started spending billions on education a half century ago, the federal power to dictate policies such as, for example, Title VII gender equality in sports and the Common Core curriculum, has steadily increased. The reason in both instances is the same: the billfold in which money is dispensed is labeled power. In this day and age, the federal government is no more likely to vacate the field of education than is the State of New Mexico.
After a two-hour conversation over lunch with my friend the reform advocate, he asked me, “Do you believe education is important?”
“Yes,” I said, “unequivocally. It’s the only way out of our mess in New Mexico.”
“Then tell people. You have a column, use it. Make people believe.”
“I’ll try,” I told him. “I’ll try.”
(Photo by Raquel Abe / CC)
Responses to “Education in New Mexico, Part 2: Classroom wars”