New ratings for N.M. schools

Starting in fall, state will rank schools based on support they need instead of A-F grades

Annjenette Torres hesitated to send her son to Milagro Middle School last year after it received an F from the New Mexico Public Education Department. She looked at private schools in Santa Fe, entered her son in enrollment lotteries for local charter schools and even considered online options, she said, before discovering not everything at Milagro was failing.

“We were blown away,” said Torres, who is now Milagro’s Parent Teacher Organization president. “If you look at the school rating and test results, everything out there says this school should not have been a great experience. But it has been. And I attribute that to the relationship between teachers and parents and administrators that you can’t understand through a letter grade.”

The state’s A-F grades — which raised controversy from the start — are on the way out.

Under a new evaluation system adopted last week by the Public Education Department, public schools across New Mexico will be

defined by the amount of support they require instead of a letter. The state agency plans to roll out an online dashboard of school profiles this fall — with information on everything from perstudent funding and summer learning opportunities to the number of counselors at a school and the average number of years a teacher has been working there.

By changing the way it evaluates schools, the Public Education Department hopes to change the way the public perceives them.

Critics of the A-F system argued it gave too much weight to students’ scores on standardized tests without examining other factors, such as the number students at a school who come from low-income families or are learning English as a second language.

“If you have a school where the majority of teachers are in their first couple years, that receives less money per pupil than a school across the street — where there is leadership change every couple years and they feel like they are always starting over — those types of metrics hold just as much value in evaluating a school as test scores,” said Tim Hand, a state deputy public education secretary.

“One of the least-effective ways to evaluate something is to look at the outcomes of two different systems that have different inputs.”

Earlier this month, the U.S. Department of Education approved an amendment to the accountability portion of New Mexico’s plan to comply with the federal Every Student Succeeds Act.

Under the current school grading system — approved by the Legislature and signed into law by former Gov. Susana Martinez in 2011, with the first round of grades released in July 2012 — each school’s profile is posted online, with a breakdown of enrollment by ethnicity, the number of students from low-income families, the number who are English-language learners and those with disabilities.

The school’s reading and math proficiency scores, A-F grade and score out of 100 points are clear — but the methodology of how the grade and score are determined is not.

The site says a letter grade is calculated by the total number of points a school receives in multiple areas and that individual student growth and overall school growth measures count more toward the letter grade than student proficiency measures.

Critics also complained that vague criteria for the A-F system changed every year.

The new rating system, set to launch in November, will divide schools into five categories, based on the level of support they need from the state to make improvements instead of assigning them letter grades.

Schools that score in the top 25 percent will be designated as “New Mexico Spotlight Schools,” while those falling in the middle 50 percent will be classified as “Traditional Support Schools.”

The bottom 25 percent of schools will be designated as either “Targeted Support Schools,” in which one or more groups of students are in need of support; “Comprehensive Support Schools,” which are those scoring in the bottom 5 percent and those with a graduation rate below 67 percent; or “More Rigorous Intervention Schools,” which have not shown improvement after three years of extra support.

The new evaluation system will put less weight on students’ scores on statewide math and reading exams.

Proficiency tests were worth 40 percent of an elementary or middle school’s grade in 2017-18 but will account for 30 points out of 100 under the new model. Student progress through an entire school year will be worth 40 points.

Public school districts say they hope the new formula will bring consistency.

“The meaning of the letter grades changed every year,” said Richard Bowman, an official with Albuquerque Public Schools. “From a statistical perspective, it was very difficult to understand something that appears understandable but is inconsistent and changes.”

Hand said his goal for the one-stop shop of in-depth statistics on every school in the state is to compare a school’s resources, personnel and student populations with academic performance and, eventually, identify best practices.

He also envisions a system in which a school will be able to trace a final outcome — such as an overall math proficiency score — back through specific grade levels, classes and teaching concepts to determine what led to the score.

The Public Education Department developed the idea for the dashboard through a dozen or so meetings across the state with school administrators, teachers and parents who asked for a way to tell more of their school’s story beyond test scores.

School officials have lauded the efforts of the agency, under Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham, to make changes.

“PED in past was pretty stringent,” said Martin Madrid, who is in his first year as superintendent of Santa Rosa Consolidated Schools after spending five years as a high school principal. “There was no give. They didn’t want to listen to educators on the ground, in the trenches.

“It’s nice to know that now, with this new administration, that they’re taking a lot of input from superintendents, teachers and principals — people in the trenches,” Madrid said.

The Public Education Department says it is still in the process of replacing the PARCC math and reading proficiency exams for students in grades 3-11 with a test that is more culturally and linguistically specific to New Mexico.

The state administered tests developed by the PARCC consortium, which stands for Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, from 2015-18, and offered a slightly altered version of the tests this year. The PARCC exams met widespread outrage — along with student walkouts and high numbers of test waivers — in their first year. In later years, opposition was more muted, though critics still complained about the length of time students spent testing.

The education department also is considering whether it will continue a system of teacher evaluations.

The department’s goal, Hand said, is to listen to school districts and reverse the past eight years of top-down commands under former Gov. Martinez.

“This is about more than policy,” Hand said. “It’s about the opportunity to rebuild those relationships.”