Value-Added Scores Finally Explained by NM Education Department
This summer, an ongoing action by New Mexico teachers is to send in Inspection of Public Records requests (IPRAs, for short), asking the Public Education Department (PED) to send evidence that backs up teacher evaluation reports received this year, and the means used to calculate the scores. We’ve waited. We’ve waited some more. Finally, some of those teachers received notices that the request is “burdensome,” and it would take the PED longer than expected.
Which is silly, since the PED happily reported the results of teacher evaluations to the press long before teachers were allowed to see them (and, of course, none of those press outlets thought to ask for substantiation). You’d think PED would have access to the reports quickly, since they just finished them up...
A Prescription for New Mexico’s Children
As a physician, I know that when you have a cure for an ailment, you use it. You don’t waste time, because you know that delay only makes the condition worse. New Mexico has a problem. We’re at the bottom of nearly every indicator of child well-being. We know what works and we’re actually giving the right medicine to a few lucky kids. But most are not getting the cure, even though we know it works and we have the resources to get it to them.
Kids need more than health care. They need a comprehensive set of services that promote healthy development. High-quality early care and education is the prescription...
Emerging Voices: Amanda Custer
Curator's note by Stevie Olson: This week, the Mercury is excited to publish two poems by Amanda Custer. Both pieces explore Amanda’s experience of living with a grandmother who has Alzheimer’s. Her language is full of engaging imagery, and both poems use beautiful progressions to harness the reader’s emotions. We hope you enjoy...
Digital Art with a North/South Consciousness
The Digital Latin America Symposium, produced by 516 ARTS in Albuquerque, New Mexico June 7-8, 2014 at the Albuquerque Museum of Art and History, drew creative minds from local communities and diverse places in Latin America. The audience was composed of academics, artists, journalists, community organizers and enthusiasts. 516 ARTS brought together world-renowned artists like Pablo Helguera and Alex Rivera, as well as showcasing talented young artists who bring new concepts and processes to artmaking. This event showed an understanding of the transnational connection that exists between peoples of the Southwest region of the US to peoples, culture and art in Latin America...
Tongues of Fire on the Border
With the defeat of Eric Cantor, immigration reform may be dead for the near future. Nonetheless, there are heroes out there who won’t be deterred by Congressional dysfunction. One of them is Reverend John Fife who was recently in Santa Fe.
Back in the early 1980s when wars were raging in Central America, refugees fled to the United States from death squads in their home countries, particularly Guatemala and El Salvador. The first church to respond to this crisis was Fife’s church, the Southside Presbyterian church in Tucson, Arizona. On March 24, 1982 he started the Sanctuary movement and initiated an “underground railroad “system to move refugees to other parts of the country and to Canada where they would be safe...
Immigrants or Refugees?
In the media barrage over the “flood” of Central American children arriving along the United States’ southern border, the refuge-seekers have been typically labeled as “illegal immigrants” by many media outlets.
But Central American migrant advocates have a diametrically opposed take on the crisis, contending that the children on the U.S. border should be considered not as immigrants but refugees meriting international treatment standards, which does not generally include detaining children, according to Human Rights Watch...
Five Questions with New Mexico Authors – Tanya Ward Goodman
This week we ask author Tanya Ward Goodman some questions about the creative genius of her father, Ross Ward, about the cascading impact on her family of his early on-set Alzheimer’s disease, and about her superbly crafted and deeply moving memoir Leaving Tinkertown from UNM Press, 2014.
NNM: Your storytelling power has made Leaving Tinkertown one of those books readers return to, savor, and use to help understand their own lives. We wondered what access the book has given you to other families and healthcare communities who’ve experienced both the torments of early onset Alzheimer’s disease and are working to find a treatment that works?
TWG: Since the book came out there have been so many opportunities to meet people in the Alzheimer’s community...
Weekly Poem: Hot Tub Time Machine
There’s a place
just beyond the present,
where the past goes to die
in the name of progress.
Where prayers
become quaint folks songs,
instead of blueprints,
instead of sheet music to the revolution,
instead of the past words
to our next donut round the sun...
Emerging Voices: Elijah Bekaye
Curator's note by Stevie Olson: This week, Elijah Bekaye shares two poems. The first piece, “How It Feels,” explores feelings of isolation and loneliness. Elijah’s carefully crafts this piece to bring the reader on an emotional journey. “To: The Reader,” the second poem, offers gentle encouragement with touches of wisdom. With the poem’s clever punctuation, it deserves the reader’s full attention and a second read--it is, after all, addressed to you. Elijah, thank you for your piece. We wish you well this summer and beyond...
Marx, Freud and Mitt Romney: What Globalization Means
Taxation Without Representation!
That was the clarion call the American colonists employed to rouse their fellows against the British in 1776. The American Colonies were important for the nascent capitalist economy in England, because they represented not only a growing market for their goods (tea was only one of many products exported to America), but also a new source of natural resources to bring back to the homeland and turn into goods to be sold back to the colonists. The British had already monopolized tea imports from China and were reaping fortunes selling it, not only in their own country but to the American colonists as well.
My point is that capitalism has always been in search of new, expanding markets...