Graduating students who don’t deserve to graduate is the “real” scandal

This opinion piece from the Albuquerque Journal can only be described as incredibly sad and frustrating. It was written by a New Mexico teacher who lost his job because he actually tried to get students to learn at grade level and even held some of them back if they couldn’t or wouldn’t do the work necessary to graduate. Here is one particularly disturbing paragraph:

What does it mean when a school has one of the highest graduation rates in the state, as Cuba High does, but among the lowest test scores? It means it is graduating students without educating them. Nearly 85% of students at Cuba High graduate in four years, but only 14% can read at grade level and just 5% are proficient in math. Such a disparity should be a crime. I had high school juniors and seniors who could barely read. One didn’t know how to look up a word in a dictionary. Many other students did not turn in a single homework assignment. Yet such students pass every year and graduate in Cuba.

We are working at RGF to have this former teacher on the Tipping Point NM podcast, but it certainly appears like the sort of thing that SHOULD be a scandal in New Mexico with robust media coverage. Unfortunately, spending tens of thousands of dollars on education annually to NOT teach children effectively appears to be acceptable to New Mexico’s political classes. The results of Nearly all measures of educational performance in New Mexico are universally awful, but for the political classes education isn’t and will not be a priority until voters make it a priority.