Bureaucracy stifles innovation at NM schools

Focus on math, reading tests leave students ill-prepared for the future

Albuquerque has a stagnant economy, and our public-school policies from Washington, D.C., and Santa Fe are part of the reason why. James Gover wrote a column last week (“An entrepreneur’s mindset for NM,” July 9) about how to change the way we do business in New Mexico to make our state more entrepreneurial. While Gover’s opinion was focused on the economy, his diagnosis of our ills is most apparent in our public school system.

In the column, he says our bureaucratic culture and insular thinking are partially to blame. He tells us that we are stagnant because we are cautious and want low-risk solutions to our problems, developing “a dependent, bureaucratic, low-risk, groupthink, politically correct culture that focuses internally.” Our schools are under-performing, and rather than betting on innovation, we have doubled down on bureaucracy.

In 2015, the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) gave states the power to decide how we test our students and what counts as student achievement. But there’s been no effort to take advantage of the opportunity to rethink our commitment to standardized testing and create our own innovative solutions that fit local needs.

Instead, every decision a principal or teacher makes is seen through the lens of reading and math scores. Meanwhile, our communities are growing poorer every year. Teachers are asking themselves “How can I increase our scores from 30 percent proficiency to 35 percent for our 11th graders?” Instead, we should be asking, what does your local community need from its graduates and what experiences will prepare them for the future? Or, how can we give students real-life internship experiences that teach students the skills they need to be prepared in our ever-changing workforce?

Our evaluation system depends so heavily on meeting reading and math scores that teachers have no room to innovate. If teachers attempt to create projects that ask for students to answer open-ended questions and solve problems that can’t be standardized, they get punished by the teacher evaluation system. Instead, too many of them resort to “drill and kill” lessons because it might raise scores a few percentage points.

Rather than bearing down on accountability that is imposed from outside the school, we should be building a teaching force that is comfortable with having the latitude to create and measure learning in their own schools. Allowing teachers to innovate and embrace their leadership role, rather than comply, is the only way to teach students how to be successful in their own unique communities and ever-changing workforce. I appreciate Grover’s analysis, but I simply don’t think he goes far enough. He suggests that the answer is to help students develop entrepreneurial mindsets and STEM education. No standardized test will measure if students can think creatively enough to make our state prosperous. And, under our current high-stakes testing system, a teacher will likely be punished if they try.

The future of our state depends on a welltrained and innovative teaching force and a new imagination for the profession itself. There is room to rethink our education system under ESSA in ways that will help chart a course toward prosperity for our state. The key will be to take the same lessons Grover discusses about our state and apply them to our schools. He tells us that our state “Develops a dependent, bureaucratic, low-risk, group-think, politically correct culture that focuses internally.” Our schools are a testament to his theory.