Oct. 24 – “Accountability” was the key word at a Legislative Finance Committee meeting this week, as lawmakers clashed with the state Department of Public Instruction over who is responsible for ensuring compliance with a judge’s ruling in a landmark case court case.
Six years after a district judge ruled that New Mexico had failed to provide an adequate education to several groups of at-risk students, a plan has yet to be formulated to advance education for these children — in part because neither the Public Education Department nor the De legislator wants to take full responsibility
At issue is the Yazzie/Martinez lawsuit, which was first filed in 2014. In 2018, First District Judge Sarah Singleton ruled that the state of New Mexico had violated students’ fundamental rights by failing to provide adequate public education to provide, as required by the state constitution.
Singleton ordered the state to take immediate steps to create an education system that ensures New Mexico’s at-risk students have the same opportunity as others to be college and job ready.
The department has argued that it was not responsible because it could not control district spending, but the judge ruled that the agency is charged with overseeing districts and has the power to “take control” of a school or district that has failed to meet the requirements. standards.
A motion filed by plaintiffs in September calls for “Legislative Education Study Committee staff” to lead the effort to craft a plan — citing a lack of leadership within the Public Education Department following the late August departure of former secretary Arsenio Romero. His departure was the third by a PED leader since 2021 and the fourth since Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham took office.
“The lack of a plan has led us to this point – the lack of a plan and the carousel of different secretaries. And here we sit today without any plan, not even a draft,” Rep. Derrick Lente, a Sandia Pueblo Democrat, told the Legislative Finance Committee on Wednesday.
“We all have a shared responsibility here,” said Public Instruction Secretary-designate Mariana Padilla, Lujan Grisham’s fifth education secretary since 2019 — appointed after Romero resigned. Her office “must be held accountable for what we have authority and oversight over, but it certainly doesn’t all fall under the Department of Public Education,” she added.
The recent motion calls for a draft proposal by May 2025 and for achieving equitable education by 2030, and provides detailed state measures to achieve that status. It also lists three major categories of noncompliance with the 2018 ruling: persistent deficiencies and staff turnover within the Public Education Department, a lack of growth in student outcomes, and the absence of a recovery plan to create permanent and recurring funding for policies that directly affect focuses on risk groups. groups of students.
The Legislative Education Study Committee did not seem eager to take the lead in drafting the plan.
“Our interpretation as a staff at this time is that … it is not a staff-developed plan,” said commission interim director John Sena. “It is the staff that coordinates with all stakeholders in the education environment to come together to do that. That includes education leaders, tribal government officials, education experts and advocates, and of course the PED.”
He added: “This is quite an aggressive timeline and does not seem realistic to us. We will see what the court decides, if it decides to rule on this.”
Padilla said the state has a plan for the students named in the lawsuit — not a specific plan, but a “holistic approach.”
“We are addressing all students in the state of New Mexico,” Padilla said. “And that’s how we approach the lawsuit.”
“Secretary, I disagree that the lawsuit itself has four groups of plaintiffs, and not the entire state,” Lente argued.
Groups include economically disadvantaged children, English language learners, Native Americans and people in special education programs.
“Even though this motion says we are not following the rules,” Padilla said, “a lot of things — a lot of incredible things — have happened at the state.”
She noted that since 2018, the state has increased funding for K-12 programs by $1.3 billion, raised teacher salaries to the national average and invested in a number of programs such as structured literacy. Some initiatives have seen success, such as efforts to improve retention rates for freshmen at Black and Hispanic colleges and K-12 students participating in summer programs.
The Department of Public Education is asking for a 4.4% budget increase to make some of the programs recurring.
“We can talk about how much we’ve spent and what we might be doing,” Lente said, “and ideas and concepts that the PED may want to take credit for in some cases — but the reality is that many of those measures are legislative measures under leadership of this legislature.”
The September motion noted continued dismal outcomes for at-risk students.
These are partly due to a lack of targeted funding, said Sunny Liu, senior budget analyst at the Legislative Finance Committee. Liu pointed to fixed proficiency rates for Native American students.
Committee Chairman George Muñoz, a Democratic senator from Gallup, noted comparisons of the outcomes of native students with those of higher-income children and asked, “Does this mean we are closing the achievement gap because the higher-income students are becoming less proficient? “
“Yes,” Liu said.
‘Wow. That doesn’t seem like a good plan,” Muñoz said. “Everyone says, ‘I want to take care of children and education,’ and no one takes the bull by the horns to solve the problem. We’re spending $5 billion to get to 50th.”
But, he said, just throwing money at education won’t be enough. He recalled how the state, under former Gov. Bill Richardson, “looted the permanent fund” to improve outcomes when New Mexico ranked 45th in education.
“We’ve put more money into it, and we’re still going to keep putting more money into it, and it’s just going to get worse. Money isn’t the problem. Something else has to be done,” he said.
