A former mayor of Albuquerque wrote an article defending the district for its poor academic performance. His basic thesis being: poverty makes it impossible for the District to perform as well as other, more economically-prosperous districts.
All I can say is “wow” and that this is the type of defeatist attitude that has led New Mexico to its current sorry state. We can’t develop our economy because we are too isolated and don’t have enough water (to name a few issues). We can’t educate our kids because we our too poor. I guess we should just give up.
The fact is that school choice has repeatedly been shown in empirical analyses to improve student outcomes, but APS has opposed choice and worked in the Legislature to oppose it.
The Democrat-controlled Legislature is in session RIGHT NOW. They COULD adopt school choice to help fix the situation right now. They won’t, not because it doesn’t work, but because of politics and the fact that too many New Mexicans have accepted the lie that we are somehow too poor to succeed.
Still don’t believe that poverty can be overcome? Look at the international PISA test results and see how many countries far poorer than the USA are beating us educationally:
In the majority of countries in western Europe, the public education dollar follows the student to public or private school. This practice has been specifically authorized in the U.S. by several Supreme Court decisions as long as guidelines are complied with. But Democrat legislators around the country would never agree to this as their core constituency group, the teachers’ unions, oppose it to the death.
APS has a budget of 1.3 BILLION dollars for about 85,000 students. That’s over $15,000 per student – and only 62% of APS high schoolers are graduating in 4 years. In some parts of the world, top level administrators would be sent to jail over numbers like that because it is inconceivable that you could have such miserable results with the money being spent unless there is some kind of fraud being perpetrated.
I agree with Charles. We live in a “Poor” state because we keep voting for people who keep us “Poor”. I am Will Steinberg and am running for the School Board in District 7. Charles hit the nail on the head. With 1.3 BILLION Budget we are Not getting any RESULTS to match that amount. I believe in “Dollars to Diplomas”. Please Vote on February 7. District 7, four years ago, had 3,800 people vote in that election. Budget shortfalls will be an issue for the next School Board. These are your tax dollars at work!