The Future of K-12 Schools Isn’t Online; It’s in New Mexico
A state where schools experienced deep adversities before COVID-19 can show the nation a pathway forward when schools reopen.
“I think we’re all going to be different after this,” Mary Parr-Sanchez told me in a phone call, “but I don’t know how.” Parr-Sanchez is the current president of NEA-New Mexico, the National Education Association’s affiliate in the Land of Enchantment, and “this” of course is the profound trauma of schooling amidst COVID-19.
All public schools in her state and nearly all nationwide are closed for the rest of the academic year due to the pandemic, and teachers and school support staff are approaching the final weeks of a remote learning stopgap effort.
Parr-Sanchez’s comment reflects a national conversation that is slowly pivoting away from crisis schooling to how to reopen schools in the new school year. “For most children, the school year ended in March,” economist Susan Dynarski wrote in the New York Times. “The sooner we face it, the faster we can fix it.”
But New Mexico’s education system was broken to begin with, Parr-Sanchez told me.
“Our current governor [Michelle Lujan Grisham] is showing impressive leadership, but our previous governor of eight years drove education into the ground,” she said, referring to former Governor Susana Martinez, whose administration’s response to the economic downturn during the Great Recession was to slash education spending, expand privately operated charter schools to compete for funding, and impose a punitive regime of evaluating teachers and schools based on high-stakes standardized testing.
Some of the heavy-handed evaluation systems Martinez championed have been repealed by Governor Lujan Grisham, but New Mexico still funds its schools less than it did in 2008.
Much of what Martinez imposed on New Mexico were pillars of education policy that started with No CONTINUE READING: The Future of K-12 Schools Isn’t Online; It’s in New Mexico - Citizen Truth