Keep putting NM’s early ed money where it works

This year’s summer break will be shorter for nearly 23,000 of New Mexico’s youngest students. But if the adults entrusted with educating them implement the extra five weeks of classroom instruction correctly, it should translate into better school years for those kids in 2018-19 and beyond.

It also should provide impetus for lawmakers to fund and make the extra instruction time program mandatory for all K-3 students in schools that qualify.

New Mexico is spending a record $28.8 million this summer on the K-3 Plus program, which adds 25 days to the school year for kindergarten through third grade for students at low-performing or low-income schools. (In last year’s tight budget only $18 million was allocated.)

But one key to students and taxpayers getting a return on those millions of dollars is carrying out the program effectively with high-quality teaching in every classroom. In Albuquerque Public Schools, third-grade reading scores have actually dropped despite the district’s receiving ten of millions of dollars for additional instructional time.

To get the best results, nonpartisan analysts working for the Legislative Finance Committee say, K-3 Plus needs to run the full 25 days and seamlessly transition into the regular school year, with no switch in teachers.

Another key is getting the students who really need and can benefit from the program into it in the first place. Sen. Mimi Stewart, an Albuquerque Democrat and chair of the Legislative Education Study Committee, says she wants to review the program awards to ensure the Public Education Department is using the money to help the “neediest students.”

That review should go beyond looking for PED bias and examine whether the state should spend an additional $62 million to cover what the LFC says is the “remaining statewide need” to serve all students eligible for the program.

K-3 Plus is offered at schools where 80 percent of the students qualify for free or reduced-price lunches and at schools that are rated poorly by the state. But because it is not mandatory, Jeannie Oakes, a presidential professor emeritus at the University of California, Los Angeles, told the LFC last week, “The kids who need it most are not the ones who come.”

Making the extra five weeks of instruction required at the schools that qualify would expand the reach of the program to children in families that for myriad reasons just can’t get it together to sign up, and then show up, for what currently is an optional summer program.

LFC analysts and Oakes say K-3 Plus is proving to be a successful way to expand learning time and close the achievement gap among students in different demographic groups, especially when combined with pre-kindergarten.

New Mexico spends close to half its $6 billion annual budget on K-12 education every year, and it has doubled its spending on programs aimed at helping young children and their families from roughly $137 million in fiscal 2012 to $269 million this year. And yet all those hundreds of millions of dollars have yet to deliver a turnaround: New Mexico continues to graduate just seven out of every 10 students from high school, the second-worst rate in the nation ahead of the District of Columbia. And that abysmal ranking is despite double-digit gains at schools that have embraced recent education reforms, including a standardized test aligned with the Common Core curriculum, teacher and school evaluations focused on student improvement, and teacher and principal mentoring.

Yes, many more students in Farmington, Belen and Alamogordo can now read and do math at grade level. But the 2017 PARCC results show just 25 percent of the state’s third-graders can read at grade level. And last year PED released data that almost all of the third-graders who can’t read are summarily promoted to fourth grade to continue their struggle — many en route to adding to the state’s dropout rate as well as subpar graduation rate.

So if K-3 Plus, implemented with fidelity and quality instruction, is delivering results, and if making it mandatory can turn the tide and provide more of New Mexico’s youngest students the education they deserve, and give taxpayers a return on their investment that’s all but guaranteed to translate into individual and aggregate economic health and wealth, it is by all means a good way to spend another $62 million.

Because data shows the $2.75 billion the state spends annually on its 300,000-plus K-12 students isn’t delivering enough.