New Mexico Mercury

In the upcoming 2014 Legislative Session I will again seek approval of a bill that would appropriate nearly $68 million to hire intervention teachers to help identify and serve students from kindergarten through the eighth grade who are struggling academically in reading and/or mathematics.

In 2013, Rep. Mimi Stewart and I introduced Senate Bill 474, which sharply contrasted with Governor Susana Martinez’s and Public Education Department cabinet-secretary-designee Hanna Skandera’s past initiatives to retain third graders not reading at proficiency without their parents’ approval of the action.  The administration recently indicated that it would again push for third-grade retention in the upcoming session, but this time it would be willing to only allow parents to appeal the decision through their school’s administration.

I pushed for a similar intervention measure in 2012 and have always believed in providing for more parental and educator collaboration, as well as placing more teachers in schools statewide specifically to intervene at all elementary levels through middle school.

This legislation will put more resources into the classroom where it’s needed, and not into a system that unfairly polices teachers and schools and does not provide support.  Not every student learns at the same level and it’s important for them to get the help that they need, when they need it. An individual’s life circumstances are often the most pervading factors affecting their educational development and intervening at the right time is extremely important. 

Neither the governor nor Ms. Skandera have spent one day teaching in the classroom, or gone through the struggles and challenges of guiding their own children through school.  They refuse to listen to those who have dedicated their entire lives to professional education and to the parents of the very children who need help the most. Their overplayed photo-ops, which brazenly manipulate innocent schoolchildren, hardly make them experts on education.

Skandera and Martinez are seeking an increase in school funding that would include a 10 percent salary increase in the base pay for those just starting out as educators, while ignoring increases for all other established teachers and public employees.  The measure also includes merit pay and bonuses for exemplary teachers based mainly on their students’ performances on Standard Base Assessment tests, a very controversial and unfair technique to evaluate teachers.

Governor Martinez and her education secretary-designate have managed to further trample on the morale of our state’s dedicated teachers.  For the last several years, we legislators have been working hard to improve our state’s slumping educational ratings and our efforts have been stonewalled by this uncompromising administration, which labels anything beyond their own questionable agenda as status-quo.

Education is an ever-evolving science and no one knows that better than the teachers on the front lines with the students, the very ones who the governor is punishing with her hardline stance.