This article first appeared in the New Mexico Political Report on October 7, 2024
New Mexico produces the second highest amount of oil and gas in the country. The taxes from oil and gas production provide funding for state programs like education. Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham spoke at the New Mexico Oil and Gas Association 2024 annual meeting Monday where she was part of a panel discussion about education.
New Mexico produces the second highest amount of oil and gas in the country. The taxes from oil and gas production provide funding for state programs like education.
Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham spoke at the New Mexico Oil and Gas Association 2024 annual meeting Monday where she was part of a panel discussion about education funding with the Permian Strategic Partnership.
“(The) reality is right now: New Mexico is the lead state in the country for the kind of investments and shifts in education,” Lujan Grisham said. “Now what we want is we want the Mississippi response took them well more than a decade, but then they started to see really quick shots in literacy, math, STEM, all of the performance measures and outcomes, including attendance and graduation rates, and that’s where we are headed.”
Lujan Grisham mentioned the Mississippi Department of Education’s Response to Intervention which was implemented to help struggling students to prevent them from falling behind.
The Response to Intervention program was adopted in 2005 and was updated in 2018.
Lujan Grisham then described what the status of public education was when the Lujan Grisham administration began in 2019.
“Without picking sides, we inherited a situation where educators felt like they were in a battle with the executive branch, and so everything was at a complete standstill,” Lujan Grisham said. “That doesn’t mean that we’re always getting along… but that we’re always on the same page.”
Lujan Grisham spoke about the changes her administration would like to implement such as a highly paid, motivated, well-qualified and supported education workforce.
“So that means cradle to career educators, and then the end of that philosophy is no wrong door: career training, free college, free childcare, home visiting, retraining most of our educators in literacy, and now literacy coaching and training by the state, so creating a wraparound set of services that sort of create longitudinally, partnerships that focus on kids and their parents,” she said.
Permian Strategic Partnership
If the state’s education system is doing well by the students it graduates out, then the economy does well, Lujan Grisham said.
“They are intrinsically… linked together. So if you don’t do one well, you don’t have the other,” she said. “Right now, our economy, including oil and gas— so thank you very much—is in nearly every sector, including renewables, more than double the national average. So depending upon the quarter that we do the analysis, New Mexico is between third and seventh nationally for both employment and economic growth. So all of our investments are creating an environment where we can continue to do these investments.”
The first thing Lujan Grisham wants to do is raise educator salaries as a means of both recruitment and retention.
“There is not a state, including this one, that has enough educators in the classroom, and right now… we’re balancing that with pre-K, and it’s been tough to get pre-K folks recruited and trained, and that’s going to require more investments in a salary,” Lujan Grisham said. “We’re just going to have to right size these economic shifts into education. So we want to spend more. We want that to be strategic, and I hope we’re going to talk about this, and we want it more directly linked to performance measures and outcomes.”
Also on the panel was Permian Strategic Partnership CEO Tracee Bentley who spoke about what Permain Strategic Partnership is doing to promote education, healthcare, workforce development and road safety.
“We think there is nothing more important than all New Mexican students and families and Permian Basin families having access to the highest quality education possible,” Bentley said.
The Permian Strategic Partnership began in 2018 and, “so far, thanks to our member companies… We’ve spent about $150 million of our own dollars in each of these areas, but we’ve leveraged that into $1.5 billion, and that’s through public private partnerships, much like we have with the governor here today.”
Bentley said that Lujan Grisham called her and told her to “get in my office” so that they could talk about education.
“She is— and the state is— pouring a lot of resources, actually, more than many other states, if you look at it and compare,” Bentley said. “So why isn’t performance improving? If so, that’s what we’re here to do with our partnership with the governor and the state, is to really see that translate into the classroom and see our academic performance go up.”
The Permian Strategic Partnership traditionally only runs programs in the Permian Basin in western Texas and southeastern New Mexico.
This is the first time a statewide program in either New Mexico or Texas has been done by the group.
“And here’s primary number one, the governor asked us to. But secondly, we know that the world and this country are heavily reliant on New Mexicans succeeding,” Bentley said. “We know that without a strong education background and access to the highest quality of education, and by education, I mean Career Technical Education. I mean early childhood. I mean literacy programs, it will have an impact on the world, and so for our industry, having a strong education system and families having access regardless of background or socioeconomic, yes, it’s the right thing to do, but it’s also in the name of national security and energy security.”
Career Technical Education, or CTE, are the courses that used to be under the Vocational-Technical name. These courses allow students to get a certification in technical skills.
Structured literacy
One of Lujan Grisham’s programs to help New Mexicans succeed is the structured literacy program which seeks to find struggling readers before they fail while supporting teachers through the science of reading and structured literacy, according to the New Mexico Department of Education.
“Our intention is to increase the number of students achieving reading proficiency and reducing the number of students requiring special education services,” the NMDOH website states.
Lujan Grisham said that no one will be satisfied until children are safe, in stable households and “(New Mexico is) number one in the country for child and family wellbeing and our educational outcomes are in the top five.”
“We’re not satisfied, but we’re also not angry, and I’m not giving up on the investments that we’ve made. We think they are effective,” Lujan Grisham said. “We’re seeing shifts, right? We’re seeing some reduction in the ways that we want in mid school and absenteeism, we are seeing literacy rates go up.”
The largest jump with regard to literacy was for Native American students, she said.
One of the changes Lujan Grisham noticed came originally from her own outrage that New Mexico’s teaching schools were not instructing future educators how to teach reading to students.
“New Mexico, forever, never trained any of our educators to teach reading. So no college anywhere, university in the state of New Mexico taught the science of reading. That’s outrageous,’ she said. “I did not know that until I started to check on why our literacy rates were not moving. It stalled when we were investing so much money inside the classroom… So we’ve been re-educating, retraining educators, and that’s working. We’re seeing that bump, but losing kids during the summer.”
To help prevent the summer slips that happen to most students, Lujan Grisham spoke about the tutoring that students can receive during school, after school and on summer break.
“We (tutored) 10,000 students this summer, and we’re seeing those jumps,” she said.
“You can read, you can do math, you can do math, you can do science, you can do science, you can do social studies, including with your money and support, we’re reinvesting right in the classroom, in STEM so I just want to lay that foundation, because without that, none of it makes sense. So the strategy now is to educate New Mexicans so that we get support to start to see jumps in the rest of it.”
The main way to do this is to have students spend more time learning which means the 180-day school year which proved to be controversial during the 2024 legislative session.
The 2024 state budget included an amendment that removed a requirement for the public school year to last 180 days.
The school year length was not mentioned in the bill by name.
“(Students) need to be in an educational environment. They need strong support before and after school. That means 180 days, and that means more quality time in a classroom,” Lujan Grisham said. “So we need help there.”
She praised the legislature for voluntary efforts such as Extended Learning Time, educator training and before and after school programs.
But they’re not mandatory. The state has almost zero accountability efforts at schools,” Lujan Grisham said. “We have local control, which I believe in, because you want parents empowered. We need parents to be more engaged.”