For the newsletter Paying Teachers More A pay raise is not about to alter the quality of the education culture in NM. As long as students cannot choose from a myriad of schools that offer choices that match their style and rates of learning and teachers are unable to match their talent up with schools or methods of education that match and have a cohesive team of like-minded student-centric-minded facilitators of learning nothing will ever change. Paying a person that is supposedly a professional more is not about to turn a light on in their brain that signals that maybe they better offer better by being more professional. It is either there or it isn’t there. Here is how it works in New Mexico: Before high school graduation, 30% drop out, of the remaining 70%, 30% of them are graduated with no more than a 9th-grade education. Of the remaining 40%, the upper echelon attends college with about 20% 0f them dropping out due to lack of preparedness and the top 10% of them graduating and seeking a better environment for opportunity and quality of life for their future family leave the state leaving the final 10% to get hired into government service, especially public education which has no metrics for accountability to results and then the cycle just repeats and repeats and repeats. What self-respecting teacher is about to come here and have their children dropped into the most deplorable education system in the US and then subject themselves to having to work with a bunch of entrenched union protected teachers that are more interested in keeping their non-accountable job and that pension than properly academically preparing children. The answer lies in creating fertile ground through closing failing weed-infested neighborhood schools, replacing them with quality autonomously run public charter schools, and then holding them accountable to student-centric results by a separate State Charter School Board. As always, I recommend self education for the supposed adults in the room by reading David Osborne’s “Reinventing America’s Schools”. Rob Wood
