Lujan Grisham, Pearce both make education a central campaign issue

New Mexico’s next governor will face an uphill climb when it comes to improving the state’s public education system.

While student proficiency scores and graduation rates have inched up during Gov. Susana Martinez’s administration, the state remains at or near the bottom of most national rankings assessing the quality of public education. As Martinez discovered, big steps are hard to come by.

But that doesn’t stop New Mexico’s gubernatorial candidates, Democrat Michelle Lujan Grisham and Republican Steve Pearce, from making education a central — if potentially risky — campaign issue.

Lujan Grisham said that if she is elected governor, she will champion the efforts of teachers and educational leaders, work to increase access to prekindergarten programs and find better ways to test students’ skills.

In four years, she said, she hopes “we will be well on our way to giving every child pre-K access, continuing the necessary investment in our classroom and better pay support for teachers, and have in place transformed assessments and evaluations that are helping our educators and districts work with families across New Mexico to provide the education every student deserves.”

Pearce, who comes from a family of educators — his mother and brother were teachers and his sister and daughter are school administrators — said, “The respect for the teaching profession is just built into my DNA.”

The state has to find a way to relieve those teachers of also working as counselors, truancy officers and behavioral health experts, he said.

In four years, Pearce would like to see “mastery of subjects with our kids.”

As if the state’s difficult history on education isn’t enough, the new governor will have to deal with the fallout from a landmark court decision that will force New Mexico to recalibrate how it funds schools, particularly for its poorest students and those who have special-education needs.

The new governor also will be tasked with adapting to most, if not all, of the ideas in New Mexico’s plan to adopt new federal education guidelines under the Every Student Succeeds Act. The state’s plan has been rated as one of the best in the nation by reviewers from nonprofit education advocacy groups, but it lays out some ambitious goals — which include maintaining a teacher and school accountability system and ensuring that 66 percent of working-age adults earn a college degree or postsecondary credential by 2030.

The plan also sets a goal of improving the statewide graduation rate by some 14 percentage points — to 85 percent — in the next five years.

For Pearce, education is one of four cornerstone issues that need to be addressed to strengthen the state. His plan to increase job growth, combat

crime and diminish poverty ties in to his efforts to improve the state’s public education standing, he said in a recent interview.

“If we don’t do all of those things simultaneously, you can make a lot of adjustments to the education system, but it won’t matter if our kids are still coming to school hungry because they’re not going to be focused on the work,” he said.

Though she also has plans to deal with job growth, crime and poverty, for Lujan Grisham, improving the public education system is the key to promoting job growth, combating poverty and decreasing crime rates.

“We have to fix the education system. It impacts all those other issues,” she told The New Mexican.

Though the two candidates have few educational reform policies in common, both say they are worried about the fate of education, including New Mexico’s chronically poor results on the standardized PARCC exam. Only about 25 percent of the state’s fourth-graders read at grade level, the test scores show.

Lujan Grisham and Pearce both say what one might expect from gubernatorial candidates: They would put the needs of educators first and support pay raises for teachers. Both said they would talk with district superintendents and other school leaders to see what is working and what can be done to address the parts that are not working. Both want to see more local control over education issues — a switch from the Martinez years when, critics say, reform ideas came straight from the Public Education Department and bypassed local school boards.

The two candidates also agree that while they would like to enact changes overnight, they likely would have to keep current policies — such as the controversial and much-criticized teacher evaluation system — until the end of fiscal year 2019.

For the most part, however, they present stark contrasts on the nuts and bolts of educational reform.