Data shows poverty no match for NM teachers

“We don’t know how to teach kids from poverty. They come with no skills — well, they have street-fighting skills. They’ve got a lot of skills; they’re just not academic skills.” “I’m really tired of being attacked by people who don’t understand education.” — State Sen. Mimi Stewart, D-Albuquerque and chair of the Legislative Education Study Committee

It’s hard to know where to start addressing the senator’s comments, made at a national conference on states complying with the federal Every Student Succeeds Act.

You could begin with trying to imagine hearing Stewart’s comments as a child or parent in a low-income family. Or hearing them as a teacher of children in poverty. Or hearing them as any caring taxpayer. But let’s just start where Stewart should have: the kids.

In 2017, economically disadvantaged students at Riverside Elementary in the Gadsden school district improved their math proficiency by 8.7 percent over 2015, and their English language proficiency by 12.4 percent. Their counterparts at Barry Elementary in Clovis improved their English language proficiency by 9.2 percent and their math proficiency by 13.4 percent. And their counterparts at Gil Sanchez Elementary in Belen improved their English language proficiency by 5.3 percent and their math proficiency by 16 percent.

All three schools, like too many in New Mexico, have a student population that is more than 98 percent low-income. While their scores are still below where they need to be — with less than 50 percent of students proficient in most cases — they show dramatic improvement. These are, presumably, the kids Stewart believes have street-fighting skills, not academic ones.

Yet the data shows that thousands more students statewide, with the help of great teachers, can now do math and read at grade level. They are on a path to academic, college and/or career success. And that’s something even a lowly layperson can “understand” about “education.”

Stewart is a former longtime educator at Albuquerque Public Schools and may be speaking from her experience there. But in her comments she sold many students, and her former teaching colleagues, short. The senator and her pals in the teachers union — which recommended she attend the conference in New Orleans “to be seen as THE NM expert on ESSA” — maintain more money, not standards and accountability, will improve the state’s abysmal education rankings.

She pointed out Republican Gov. Susana Martinez’s administration released a video of snippets of her speech, which she said were taken out of context. In a follow-up interview with the Journal, she insisted she is tired of “being attacked by people who don’t understand education.”

Regardless, while Stewart was in the limelight denigrating our students and throwing up her hands at the prospect of teaching them, the standards set in the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers exam and the accountability embedded in teacher evaluations and school grades based on student improvement are showing something quite different.

Because no matter what Stewart might proclaim from a dais in New Orleans, there are teachers in New Mexico who know very well how to teach kids from poverty. The data on schools from Gadsden to Clovis to Belen and beyond shows it. And while there is much work to do, those teachers, and their students, are doing that important work every day.

And it’s student improvement that proves New Mexico’s low-income kids have much more than the “street smarts” Stewart gives them credit for — they, and the professional educators who teach them every day are just plain smart.