Cultural competency is all about respect

Under the Obama administration, the education slogan became a “Race to the Top.” Since New Mexico’s national standing dropped from 33rd to 50th place in education, New Mexico students have nowhere to go — but up. The question is “how far and how fast” will current legislation can get them?

Most New Mexicans now know that education in our state has sunk so low, New Mexico is now at the bottom of the nation, and there’s a court deadline to improve it by April 15. So the race is on … .

Like most students and teachers in New Mexico, I celebrated when our newly elected Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham threw Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, or PARCC under the bus, but most New Mexicans don’t know why this test was so bad. Besides paying millions of dollars every year to British publishing company, Pearson, for the test, the scoring was simply invalid.

I should know. I failed Pearson’s training to grade seventh-grade essays because I refused to score an essay that failed to “respond to the prompt” the same as one with “insufficient evidence or reasoning.” Any good researcher knows you never rank two different conditions the same score because this invalidates your results. Yet the PARCC essay scores falsely reported to millions of students that their writing was bad when that wasn’t necessarily the case.

So, the states paid millions of dollars every year to a British company to tell American students they couldn’t think — when they could — and American parents paid for this misinformation. As a policy debate coach, I can tell you that British standards of reasoning can’t measure American arguments. Yet that’s what PARCC tried to do, although the test did not accurately “Score the Core” — the Common Core.

The Common Core State Standards, or CCSS, are a voluntary set of standards in math and English that have been adopted by 45 states over the past 10 years. This levels the playing field, so the same basics are taught across all the states. But that’s not all. The Common Core emphasizes critical thinking skills over content, and that’s what PARCC didn’t accurately measure: critical thinking.

What the Common Core is designed to do is like that maxim: “Give a man a fish, feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, feed him for a lifetime.” I believe in the Common Core, but PARCC wasn’t the right way to test it because there’s more to New Mexico’s Common Core than in any other state. It’s full of new tools to help New Mexico students “rise to the top,” but these tools were buried under the Martinez administration.

Unknown to most people, New Mexico educators took the unique option in 2010 to adopt “additional 15 percent state standards,” and the standards added were for “cultural competency.” The principles behind cultural competency are that students learn to appreciate their own cultures and to respect the cultures of everyone else.

These are powerful standards because students who understand the meaning of culture and the importance of each person’s perspective, are far less likely to be biased in their own understandings of the world, and far better prepared to be successful in multicultural world.

Twenty-first century global citizenship goals provide the framework for New Mexico’s English language skills, and it’s easy to understand why cultural competency can teach students intercultural, global competency skills. With the Spaceport preparing to launch Virgin Galactic ships, I think global competency should be used to launch New Mexico’s students to the top. Cultural competency — it’s not just a good idea, it’s the law.

Patricia Kingsley is a bilingual educator in history and English Language Arts. She lives in Silver City.