New Mexico students’ reading proficiency is on the up. But math — not so much

A half-step forward is better than no step at all, according to the New Mexico Public Education Department.

On Wednesday, the department made public standardized testing results from the 2022-2023 school year. The results, which are months late in their release, show gains in reading and writing proficiency rates across the state by about 4 percentage points to 38%.

“Statistically, it’s very significant that that (happened),” Education Secretary Arsenio Romero said. “I would be ecstatic for us to continue with 4% gains, but I feel very confident that … we can have double-digit gains next year.”

That appeared to include improvements in reading proficiency for student groups identified in the landmark Yazzie-Martinez lawsuit. In 2018, a judge found the state’s most underserved populations, including Native American students, English learners, students with disabilities and economically disadvantaged students, weren’t being provided a sufficient education system.

Each of those demographics’ improvements were more or less on par with the rest of the state, with English learners and economically disadvantaged students seeing 4 percentage point improvements, and students with disabilities, on the lower end, seeing a 2 percentage point gain.

In math, New Mexico students stagnated, losing 1 percentage point statewide, and Yazzie-Martinez students followed suit, hovering around zero in terms of progression or regression.

PED officials argued that while growth is a top priority, stabilizing first helps bring students back to a level of normalcy in terms of proficiency.

“The narrative here is essentially that we’re able to stabilize,” said Paola Peacock-Villada, director of Research, Evaluation and Accountability. “This is a stability year.”

PED officials lauded the state’s progress on training teachers in the science of reading — so far, at least 3,125 educators have received such training, and 5,873 are currently enrolled — in explaining the reading gains New Mexico saw.

They also cited math courses for teachers currently in development to help along achievement in that subject.

Amanda Aragon, executive director of NewMexicoKidsCAN, an education advocacy group, said the data made public Wednesday was cause for celebration, but lamented that it wasn’t complete.

“Today’s data release brings conflicting emotions. On one hand, the progress made in schools and (districts) that show improved outcomes is worthy of celebration,” she said in an emailed statement. “But we are lacking the full picture of student performance by excluding early literacy, science and SAT results.”

As of about 6:45 p.m. Wednesday, the data was not available on the PED’s websites, and the department had not provided district- or grade-level data to the Journal.

Inconsistencies

Despite extra steps the department took with data this year, Wednesday’s release came with some kinks.

The PED has published achievement data for last school year in separate places: on its “Accountability” webpage and on New Mexico Vistas, a school, district and state scoring platform.

But in some key student groups, the datasets offer different views on student achievement from the 2021-2022 school year, calling into question exactly how much certain demographic groups did or didn’t improve over the 2022-2023 school year.

For example, according to numbers found on New Mexico Vistas, students with disabilities were 29% proficient in math in 2021-2022. According to embargoed numbers provided by the PED ahead of Wednesday’s data drop, they were 8% proficient in 2022-2023 — a 21-percentage point drop, despite a department calculation that their proficiency rate remained the same.

That calculation could only be reconciled when using data provided on the accountability page.

When those inconsistencies were pointed out by the Journal, Peacock-Villada said the PED’s vendor for the New Mexico Vistas site, Real Time Solutions, had errantly pulled inverse data for certain student groups, listing proficiency rates of students without disabilities as the rates for students with disabilities, for example.

That issue happened with a few other demographics, including English learners and economically disadvantaged students. Peacock-Villada said that in part, the errors were made because web developers were working on tighter deadlines than normal, but that staff were working to rectify the errors on the New Mexico Vistas site.

The data on the accountability page also has its inconsistencies.

White students, for example, apparently were 53% proficient in reading in 2021-2022, according to that dataset, 13 percentage points more than they were in 2022-2023. But if using New Mexico Vistas data, white students were 36% proficient in 2021-2022, which is in line with a PED calculation that their proficiency rate increased by 4 percentage points.

Peacock-Villada said she didn’t know how those errors made their way into that file, but that the data on the New Mexico Vistas site was accurate and that the incorrect data in the spreadsheet would be corrected.

PED spokesperson Martha Pincoffs said the department would launch a “comprehensive cleaning-up process” to make sure all data across its website matched.

“This is the data that’s been worked on and is trusted … but we have to clean up and make it match,” Pincoffs said. “Transparency is the key.”

Some still expressed concerns about issues with the data.

“Without data to assess how students are doing and where they need support, educators and schools are flying blind. Quality and timely data is a must if we’re to close opportunity gaps for New Mexico’s students,” Teach Plus New Mexico Executive Director Hope Morales said in an emailed statement.

Delays

The test results made public on Wednesday were months behind the PED’s self-imposed deadlines. Last year, the department made a lofty promise of turning the results around much sooner, saying it would have them sometime in mid- to late-May.

This year, a week and a half after the date results were published in 2022, the department still could only produce preliminary results, though it acknowledged it was running behind. The PED then gave itself a “mid-October” deadline to publicly release the results, which it also missed.

Romero has repeated his desire to “get it right” and references to “catching up” on other projects, including New Mexico Vistas, a platform the PED hadn’t released the likes of since before the COVID-19 pandemic.

PED officials last week added that the department incorporated more measures this year to make sure the results were as accurate as possible, including a more robust accounting of participation on the assessments and a file, provided to districts and charter schools, to show each student who was counted.