When it comes to understanding and holding government accountable, the first requirement is transparency. The Rio Grande Foundation has been researching and analyzing government in New Mexico for a long time and has thus been among the State’s strongest supporters of transparency and open government.
It is awfully difficult to analyze government, let alone hold it accountable, without ready access to basic information like budgets and other statistics about the government entity in question.
This document looks at the Public Education Department (PED). As seen below from the screenshot taken of the “School Fact Sheet” page of PED’s website, basic information has not been updated for several years:
- Dropout reports have not been posted since 2014-2015,
- A variety of district enrollment has not been updated since 2009-2010;
- Student/Teacher ratios have not been updated since 2011-2012;
This lack of updated information is troubling and frustrating for researchers looking to better-understand New Mexico’s public schools, but there is supposed to be a trove of additional information available at the New Mexico Sunshine Portal: http://www.sunshineportalnm.com
Unfortunately, when clicking on the “Local Education Providers” tab one will find that virtually no information is listed on the site.
The Sunshine Portal is not just supposed to have relevant information relating to New Mexico’s public schools available, it is the law.
SB 327 was sponsored by Sen. Sander Rue in 2011. It passed both houses unanimously. Among (but by no means limited to) the information that is specifically required under the law is:
- the annual budgets of each district,
- a directory of the local education provider’s employee positions by school name, title and salary;
- monthly revenue by source;
- an inventory of all real property owned by the local education provider.
As of December 11, 2017, none of this information was available.
While the Rio Grande Foundation has been going through individual school district websites to track down some of this information, the process has been slow and laborious and that’s just for New Mexico’s 10-largest school districts. The State has 89 school districts.
Said, Rio Grande Foundation president Paul Gessing, “This law was passed in 2011. It is almost 2018 and this website’s information as it relates to K-12 spending is nearly useless. Combine that with the lack of information PED’s own website and local districts (with the notable exception of Albuquerque Public Schools) not publishing their budget data in a clear and usable fashion, the lack of transparency is shocking.”
What is especially shocking is that information on most of the items in the first table shown above, has not been updated since BEFORE the update to the Sunshine Portal Act was passed in 2011. The PED needs to be held accountable for this huge lapse.
your page and tenacity are both awesome. i am a teacher in southern dona ana county and i would love for you to FOIA or Inspection of Public records how much Pearson Ed makes off the taxpayers in new mexico. although i live in west texas, i teach in nm. i pay taxes in nm. pearson ed has our online gradebook, special education IEP platform, our student data systems for discipline, the textbooks, the common core aligned supplements, the attendance system…..Pearson Ed is based in london and has ownership in qatar if my information is correct. why cannot NMSU, NM Tech, UNM with their brilliance and foresight, develop this same type of data driven system and keep this stuff in house(so to speak)? i found your site last spring and the rio grande foundation site which i assume are similar and i just LOVE the info. let me know if you can find this info. i would love to have the facts about this fleecing.
It would be tough to find out how much any one company is getting in terms of tax dollars. After all, we can’t even get basic budget information made available on K-12.
Outsourcing makes sense if it’s done intelligently. Private companies routinely do make-vs-buy analysis to determine whether an outside firm delivers better quality at lower cost than doing the job in-house. Once a decision to outsource has been made, the best supplier is determined by competitive bidding. The question is not whether New Mexico schools should use outside educational resources, but whether the decision has been made with thoughtful analysis.