THINKING ABOUT READING PROFICIENCY IN NEW MEXICO (AND BEYOND)

At the 19 August meeting of the local NAACP chapter, guest speaker State Senator Carrie Hamblen responded to my question about the abysmal National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) proficiency scores for 4^th-grade reading in New Mexico not only in 2022, but also in decades past.  Her responses were not surprising; they are the common responses by those protecting teachers from accountability for failing to do the job which they are paid to do.  Defense-of-teachers responses are mainly four.

 

One, teachers cannot teach effectively when students come from backgrounds beset by poverty, unemployment, poor nutrition, poor health, domestic violence, broken families, lack of parental support, and the like social deficiencies.  Indeed, there is a strong correlation between educational attainment and socio-economic conditions.  The implication is that, until these social deficiencies are greatly ameliorated or remedied, little can be done to improve student achievement.  Which shifts the blame for poor academic performance to the world at large and brings education reform to a standstill.

 

Two, teachers cannot teach effectively when students are not motivated to learn.  The implication is that teachers’ first job is to motivate students by one or another approach.  One assumes that motivation is external to teaching, precedes it, and must succeed before teaching can succeed.  Explaining why a subject is important to students, now or someday, and encouraging them are common devices.  Another assumes that motivation is achieved by making learning fun.  Many classroom activities, projects, field trips, and the like have long been designed and deployed for this purpose.  Unhappily, no proof that these approaches or devices have made a positive difference exists.  It hardly matters that students are motivated to learn if their teachers do not know the subject matter which they are supposed to teach.

 

Three, defenders of teachers often use anti-elitist canards to rebut critics of teachers.  So they impute to critics a standard of education which assumes that the only worthy education is a four-year college preparatory education.  I doubt that critics assume or advocate this standard.  I believe that they value a good K-12 education for all students.

 

Four, defenders of teachers often use anti-intellectual stereotypes of teachers to rebut critics of teachers.  They impute to critics a preference for teachers like the stereotype, brainy pedants who lecture, who drone, who bore; the brainier the teachers, the less able to teach effectively.  This stereotype reveals its user’s attitudes toward education.

 

These dogmas and stereotypes attempt to avoid or disarm criticism based on the two most troublesome facts about K-12 education in New Mexico.  One is that 79% of 4^th-grade students cannot read proficiently.  The other is that those who have not learned to read proficiently by the end of 4^th grade will have great trouble reading to learn in grades 5 through 12.  These facts have ominous implications for students’ 5^th-though-12^th-grade education in all subjects, their lives and livelihoods thereafter, and the economy of the state.

 

Characteristically, each of these dogmas or stereotypes focuses on something outside of or peripheral to the educational process and ignores what defines it: the transfer of knowledge or skills from those who possess them to those who does not.  Thus, proper educational focus must be on the subject matter, as defined by the curriculum, hopefully coherent, complete, and properly structured and sequenced; and on teachers, hopefully, competent, confident, and committed to transfer it by instruction.

 

To fix a problem, it helps to know its source.  The NAEP data imply the source: the inability of K-4 teachers to teach reading well enough that their students learn to read proficiently.  So the question is, what explains their inability.  My opinion: ignorance of grammar, admittedly, the bogeyman of English instruction.  Although proficiency in reading involves three components—vocabulary, grammar, and comprehension—, elementary school teachers do not know grammar, as both former Superintendents Stan Rounds and Karen Trujillo admitted to me.  Both knew ignorant teachers’ main line of defense: “grammar does not make good writers.”  Both agreed that the ignorant were not qualified to know.  Yet both tacitly accepted this defense as justifying defiance of state educational requirements.  Teachers’ protestations of good intentions and earnest efforts ring hollow when teachers defend their ignorance of required subject-matter.

 

Grammar has benefits well beyond snobbish correctness or micro-aggressions, both reflected in the cutesy T-shirt warning “I’m silently correcting your grammar.”  Having grammar in one’s head or at one’s fingertips can do much to improve reading comprehension (and make writing more precise and polished).  From a pedagogical perspective, the benefit of grammar instruction for reading is its focus on words and their relationships to one another.  Perhaps for that reason among others, the state’s English curriculum requires that grammar be taught in K-4 grades (and beyond).

 

Given the importance of writing in all academic courses and the possible segregation of a concern for grammar only to English teachers, all prospective teachers in New Mexico should be required to take and pass with high marks a course in grammar as a condition of certification.  For all teachers should be able to help students with writing grammatically and reading comprehendingly.

 

Let me bring together the topic of motivation and the topic of grammar by citing two examples from my experience.  Example one: A 4^th-grade class whose teacher invited me to teach the lesson of the day, adjectives and adverbs.  I had some advantages; I was someone new and different, and the father of a student in the class.  My motivating ploy was simple: all I said was that, if they paid attention, they would learn to know for certain how to identify adjectives and adverbs.  So I taught: general principles, rules for identification, on-blackboard exercises, and, along the way, answers to questions.  The students got it.  When class was over and while I was talking with the teacher, a student came to us, got permission to talk to me, and asked, “why can’t you be our teacher.”

 

Example two: A remedial class in grammar for 1^st-year students at a state university.  My motivational spiel indicated the importance of grammar and, for them, knowledge to replace their uncertainty about grammar because of K-12 guessing games.  After I described my instructional process and standards—introduction to the new topic, home reading, memorization, and exercises, class review, quizzes (with only enough time to instantly write the correct answer)—, three of the seven first-day students dropped out.  The other four stayed the course.  As they racked up high scores in quiz after quiz, exercise after exercise, test after test, their confidence grew.  They had fun finding examples of bad grammar in the local paper.  And they told their friends, who stopped me on campus or in the school cafeteria to inquire whether I would be teaching the grammar course the following term.

 

These examples have two points.  One is not my success, but my students’.  The other is that the best motivation is subject-matter mastery, not fun-and-games.  These students wanted more of my teaching because they wanted the rewards of learning the subject and of acquiring confidence in themselves because of their learning.

 

Unfortunately, state senators and representatives ignore classroom evidence and rely instead on conventional wisdom, educational fads, and a focus on programs and salaries because they know no better or have ulterior political motives.  They tinker with the peripherals; they do not address the essentials.  They could legislate improvements in public education in New Mexico without throwing money around and building empires, and without jeopardizing their political careers.  Here are four suggestions:

 

1.    Require state-funded schools of education to ensure that graduates have subject-matter competence at proposed grade level as determined by an out-of-state, independent educational evaluator.  (Use the results to evaluate the schools of education.)

 

2.    Require all candidates for K-12 teaching positions to be assessed for subject-matter competence at proposed grade level as determined by an out-of-state, independent educational evaluator.

 

3.    Develop a higher-salaried pay scale for all teachers, current and new, who achieve a score of 95% or greater on a subject-matter competency test as determined by an out-of-state, independent educational evaluator.  Permit teachers to take the test only once every 3 years.  Set the higher-salaried scale at about double the current salary scale.

 

4.    Select that out-of-state, independent educational evaluator(s) on the basis of demonstrated testing rigor and standardized distribution of test scores.

WHY REPUBLICANS STILL SUPPORT TRUMP

Not all, but most, Republicans support Trump.  Their support is unwavering and will remain unwavering.  Defeats of candidates whom he has supported and indictments for crimes which he may have committed have not weakened his support.  Indeed, what would likely destroy the political appeal of other candidates actually increases his appeal at the expense of the philosophy, values, and structure of American democracy.

 

 There are four primary reasons for such staunch support.  One is traditional loyalty of some Republicans simply out of family tradition or loathing of Democrats (in turn, “yallah dawg Democrats” revile Republicans).  A second is adherence to traditional Republican positions which they believe Trump holds—smaller government (depends on the issue; abortion, for example, requires very big government), less regulation, lower taxes—though, in themselves, these positions alone have proven incapable of winning elections.  Some of these Republicans may hold their noses but will still vote the party ticket, with Trump at the head of it.

 

A third is that Trump supporters have been too long committed to him to recognize or admit a mistake now of years standing, even if contrary to faith or reason.  However coarse, cruel, or egocentric his behavior, it represents a one-finger salute to elites and the establishment.  Their grievances, real or imagined, and their resentments, justified or not, Trump has recognized, augmented, and exploited; he feels them; he is their guy.  Although he has done nothing about their grievances and resentments—he has every political motive not to do anything about them—, his dedicated followers are not going to acknowledge being fooled, conned, and fleeced.  People do not like to admit even little mistakes; they are not going to admit whoppers.

 

The fourth reason is quite different from these three.  It is a conviction founded on something essential, older and stronger.  As the successor to Barack Hussein Obama, Trump is the last White Hope.  Republicans perceive him as he presents himself: their champion, bloodied but unbowed by investigations and indictments, in this fight against the equality of all others to white male Christians.  The more he is investigated and indicted, the greater his heroism in the cause of their hegemony in jeopardy.  And this cause is the greater because “White” is too narrow if it is thought to represent only skin color.  It goes well beyond blacks, to browns, yellows, and reds; to non-European immigrants; to Jews and Muslims, mainly; and to those whose sex- and gender-related issues are not his, like abortion, contraception, gender identity, and gender orientation (LGBTQ…).  Inter-racial marriage fits in here someplace.  These culture war issues are Republicans only trump cards—pun intended—, and they are Trump’s cards.

 

A mass movement in this cause is not an anomaly.  The truth is that, in American history, racism and its opposite, democracy, go hand in hand.  In 1619, slaves first landed in the Virginia colony; in 1619, the first democratic assembly was founded there.  At the time of the American Revolution, a third of the colonial population remained loyal to monarchy and opposed to democracy.  In the Civil War, about the same fraction of the country’s population supported slavery, in opposition to the proposition that all men are created equal.  Today, about that same fraction opposes that same proposition.  You know who might have said it: oligarchs, dictators, fascists, communists, totalitarians, Christian fundamentalists, Catholic or evangelical, and bigots ye always have with you.

 

In light of this history, many to the left-of-center show themselves naïve in thinking or even hoping that Republicans will have a moment of clarity on the way to or in the voting booth come November 2024.  Why would they?  They are hardened in their dogmas and in their nostalgia for a Norman-Rockwell-Reader’s-Digest world, which was white male Christian supremacist and which subordinated or excluded women and minorities—racial, religious, ethnic.  They are anxious about the decline in church attendance and allegiance to Christianity (“godless communism” on the Left), the furor about racial and gender issues (echoes of “uppity Negroes” and feministas)—the grievances and resentments of horny men 18-35 (i.e., “incels”) with no appeal to women represent a social and sexual pathology all its own—, the controversies about critical race theory (not understood) and censorship of books about such things as racial and gender education (including “grooming”).  If documented truth about the legitimate 2020 election can make no dent, lies about everything else confirming their prejudices will remain prevalent and potent.  Whatever else might be said about Trump’s supporters, they do not desire a multicultural democracy or share America’s traditional aspiration for a “more perfect union.”

 

I see no relief in sight from these people, the “base,” those inferior or insecure souls who need prejudice to prop them up with a false sense of superiority.  In Thoreau’s words, they live “lives of quiet desperation” though they are no longer quiet about their baseless angst.  Someone—who is not known—said, “the price of liberty is eternal vigilance.”  Today, that price is exercising Constitutional rights.  Showing the flag and evoking the Founding Fathers are not good enough.  True patriotism requires much less than what they pledged in a desperate hour: their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor; it requires only that we be informed, register, and vote.  Ballots, not bullets, are the arsenal of American democracy.

A CONSIDERATION OF CITY COUNCIL CANDIDATES

According to citizens who have spoken at its meetings, the quality of City Council has declined over recent decades.  Its debased condition today cannot be attributed entirely to Mayor Ken Miyagishima, but his four terms, or 16 years, in office have necessarily contributed much to Council’s decline.  The mediocrity of our maybe well intentioned but certainly unimpressive cast of Councilors has probably discouraged others who are capable and would be competent and committed to serve constructively.

 

Accordingly, until this week, it looked as if three current Council members—one running for Mayor, two running for re-election as Councilors—would go unchallenged, leaving voters with no choice.   All three of these candidates, if elected to the offices which they seek, will perpetuate the mediocrity of the current Council.

 

Fortunately, Eric Enriquez, former Assistant City Manager (2020-2022) and former Fire Department Chief (2016-2020), has announced for mayor, against current District 1 Councilor Kasandra Gandara.  With his candidacy, voters have a clear choice between someone with executive experience in, and a thorough knowledge of, city government, and a loquacious and petty politician of no distinction or accomplishment.  To avoid repeating myself, I refer readers to my previous (3 May) blog, which discusses Councilor Gandara’s character and conduct in office.

 

Unfortunately, neither District 2 Councilor Tessa Abeyta not District 4 Councilor Johanna Bencomo yet has a challenger.  The quality of City Council would be immensely improved if either, not to say both, were replaced.  Because I have repeatedly criticized Councilor Bencomo without devoting an entire blog to her, I shall limit my remarks to a few words in a (21 July 22) blog which capture the lack of integrity of her Council work.

 

The members of City Council, who have little or no knowledge of government, policy development and implementation, and, most of all, doubtful integrity and dubious priorities.  Johanna Bencomo, who was for police reform, particularly a citizen review board, until the Mayor berated her for not respecting the police and she, too unliberated to defend herself—how dare you speak to me in that fashion, Mr. Mayor?—immediately abandoned her position and apologized that she, too, loves the police; and is trying to get back to the head of the line on police reform, where the microphone is. 

 

She was for police reform until she was against it—a transformation in less than three minutes.  She later trash-talked a sensible proposal for such a board as “superficial”—a cheap shot from someone who has offered not one proposal of her own which would suggest that she is in any way honest about wanting police reform.  I have not seen her announcement for re-election, but I assume it is replete with the empty clichés which she artfully strings together for her benefit when she so often speaks to the media.

 

In her Bulletin interview (28 July) announcing her run for re-election, Councilor Abeyta addressed police and crime in more detail than most candidates do.  However, given her record, it is not surprising that she misrepresented herself.  Abeyta praised herself for having “asked good questions” about the proposed civilian police oversight board.  As a witness, I can attest that few were good and most were bad.  With, I suspect, solicited assistance from a friendly lawyer, she spent most of her time in an aggressive, legalistic cross-examination of Peter Goodman in opposition to the proposal.  Thus prepared in advance, she made no effort to understand the merits of the proposed board or to address and resolve any issues.  She revealed her temperament as a councilor disposed, not to reasonable consideration of a citizen’s informed proposal, but to rude, hostile ideological opposition to it.

 

Abeyta further claimed to “want transparency and accountability.”  The claim is, to put it politely, hypocritical balderdash.  She is one of the Mayor’s two appointees—the other is District 1 Councilor and Mayor Pro Tem Kasandra Gandara—on the Public Safety Select Committee.  This Committee has operated in secrecy so stringent that the four other Councilors did not know of its existence.  In other words, Councilor Abeyta has been part of a clique which rules on issue of public safety yet is unknown not only to the public, but also to colleagues.  Such is her “transparency”; such is her “accountability”; such is her trustworthiness.

 

From personal experience, I know that she responds to the concerns of citizens on the basis of her feelings about them.  When I appeared before the Utilities Board on which she sits, she (with Johana Bencomo) paid no attention to me, did not even look at me, but shuffled papers in a display of contempt.  I believe and do not mind that she is no fan of mine because of my criticism of City Council and its Councilors.  But, as a Councilor, she is expected to address issues, not act on grudges from her hurt feelings.  A thin skin and a supply of spleen are not desirable characteristics of an elected official.

 

Notwithstanding my wishes for the defeat of all three of these candidates, I am a realist.  Councilor Gandara faces a challenger, and I know that many people are less thrilled with her than she is with herself.  So there is hope for a refreshing change of leadership.  But Councilors Bencomo and Abeyta, having no challengers, are assured of re-election.  One vote for each will do the trick.  In these circumstances, the best that citizens can do to signal their desire for something better than political mediocrity, mendacity, and meanness is not to vote for them.  Even so, small vote totals will not matter to these candidates; they are so indifferent to and contemptuous of ordinary citizens that they will remain impervious to their concerns or public opinion.

WHO IS TRYING TO IMPROVE NEW MEXICO'S PUBLIC EDUCATION? OR WHAT THE HELL IS BILL SOULES DOING FOR PUBLIC EDUCATION IN NEW MEXICO?

Richard Coltharp’s 4 August column, “The rankings of O Fair New Mexico,” reported that, in “WalletHub’s rankings of 2023’s States with the Best & Worst School Systems, …. Frustratingly, New Mexico didn’t even make the top 50.  Thanks to the pesky inclusion of the District of Columbia, New Mexico ranked dead last at 51.”  How’s them apples, teach?

 

There are two possible answers to the first question.  One is that, collectively, no one is trying, not teachers, teaching assistants, and reading specialists through fourth grade, no school board members in all districts, no members of the House and Senate Education Committees, no employees of the Public Education Department (PED), and the Governor.  The other is that even those who would try—you know, good intentions—to improve the public school either have no clue how to do so or lack the courage to make the effort.

 

There is no credit to go around after an honest look at the educational attainments of public-school students in the most basic of all subjects: reading.  The rule of thumb is that, through 4^th grade, students learn to read; after 4^th grade, they read to learn.  Why Juanito can’t read joins why Johnny can’t read.  According to 2022 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) results, 21% of New Mexican 4^th-grade students read with proficiency or better.  Which means that 79% do not.

 

 

The simple, uncomplicated fact which no one—teachers, teaching assistants, and reading specialists through fourth grade, school board members in all districts, members of the House and Senate Education Committees, PED employees, and governors—will face: teachers through the 4^th grade are failing to do their job.  In fairness, the teachers themselves are not well-enough educated or trained to do it.  In fairness (?), school hiring personnel do not care so long as there is a baby-sitter (family member of friend?) in every classroom.  Though state government can demand more of the PED and schools of education—even their name is a joke—, it does nothing to any effect, as the NAEP results show, and not for just this year but for many years past, with no relief in sight.

 

Which means that New Mexico’s public schools set up four of every five students for academic misery, struggles, or failure, with, even if they graduate, a deficient education for little better than unskilled or low-skilled jobs.  Which means that they will not have careers and the state will not have a workforce attractive to out-of-state, high-tech firms.  When the oil and gas run out and stop providing half the state’s revenues, New Mexico will remain and continue to rely on a third-world economy as a retirement destination of low costs and lousy services, a tourist attraction, a dependent of the film-industry, a water-intensive, low-wage agrarian market, and a repository of radioactive waste.  As it is, New Mexico’s legislators and governors are content that the federal government essentially subsidizes the state on about a $4000-per-capita basis.  Only fossil-fuel tax revenues and federal welfare, not state efforts, prop up its educational system and keep it from collapsing, not just trail Mississippi and the District in national rankings.  New Mexico’s public school system might be better off as a ward of the Department of Education.  Am I the only one outraged by this sustained, slovenly performance?

One answer to the second question is twofold.  One, Soules thinks that raising teachers’ salaries and supporting more programs like Early Childhood Education which require more teachers will do the trick.  The factual record says otherwise, that these expensive undertakings are not magic bullets.  Soules, elected in 2012, serving since 2013, does what other New Mexican legislators and governors do: throw money at problems and build empires.  Two, in Soules’s case, like that of so many others, uses taxpayer funds to bribe his constituency of teachers to vote for him when he runs for re-election and thereby continue in office as the chair of the Senate Education Committee.  Nice work if you can get it, and he’s got it.

 

In return for spending taxpayer funds in higher teacher salaries and more programs, and thus in Soules’s political career, he has allowed the slide begun before he took office to continue.  Although covid can explain some deterioration in scores, the decline in New Mexico was steeper than in the nation.  Which means that the more spent on education, the worse thing got as the gap widened.  After very modest gains for a few years shortly after Soules ascended to high office, reading scores have descended rather precipitously in recent years, while teachers’ salaries increased dramatically.  In short, Soules knows how to pay for what he wants and gets—votes for re-election—without concern whether students get what they need—a competent, committed, and confident teacher in every course defined by a rigorous curriculum.

 

Worse, I know that Soules has rejected reforms which might make a difference.  He scorns them because he knows that to consider, not to say support, them would blemish his political attractiveness to teachers.  Any reforms—that is, improving changes—in academic curriculums or teacher qualifications, in certification, and in compensation he views as dangers.  I know because, years ago, when I lunched with Soules to suggest these and other related reforms, he objected then, regarded me as a threat, and has refused ever since even to acknowledge my presence in shared venues.

 

New Mexico’s climate may be heating and drying up, but its public school system is cooling off.  Last again and ever more likely to stay there.