Martinez/Skandera education reforms having positive impacts

We’ve been reporting on New Mexico’s abysmal graduation rate performance according to the national “Diploma’s Count” report for years. For example, it was just 54% back in the 2009 version of the report.

But, as the Albuquerque Journal noted in its top story today, the latest edition of the report shows New Mexico schools to be making significant gains, the greatest improvement since 2007 of any state in the nation. We’re still 44th, but we’re moving in the right direction.

A few points:

1) Clearly, the Gov.’s reforms are having significant, positive impacts;

2) Improving from 50th to 44th is good, but 44th is definitely not good enough. We need to continue with the Gov.’s reforms and convince the Legislature to adopt more significant reforms like improved school choice options to achieve even greater improvements;

3) The Gov.’s critics need to explain why New Mexico is seeing such tremendous improvement despite their extremely loud protestations.

4) Perhaps the push to tap the permanent fund for an expensive new Pre-K program can be put on hold. Clearly, New Mexico’s education system CAN improve its performance on existing resources absent a massive increase in spending.

We’ve only scratched the surface in education reform with some significant improvements. It is time for the Legislature to embrace the Gov.’s reforms and come up with some innovative ideas of their own.