22. I Love “Think New Mexico”: Fred Nathan

Episode Transcript

Bunny: (00:00)
Hi there. I’m Bunny Terry, and you’re listening to the I Love New Mexico podcast. Whether you’re a native new Mexican, who’s lived here for your entire life, or you’re just considering a visit, this episode is for you. Join us as we share a lot of New Mexico’s stories, talk about all things New Mexico, and include topics like what’s magical here, where you ought to visit, what’s happening, and the things you absolutely cannot miss in the land of Enchantment. We’re excited that you’re here and we can’t wait to show you what an amazing place New Mexico is, because let’s face it, I love New Mexico. Welcome everybody, and I’m so excited because today we have somebody who is not just, um, an, an amazing, uh, an amazing influence in the state of New Mexico, but also a really good friend of mine, somebody I’ve known since we were both babies in a law firm in, um, Albuquerque. I, Fred, you said, did you co you came in the eighties to New Mexico.

Fred: (01:15)
I came in 1987 and your listeners can’t see us, but you have retained your looks. And I look an old man,

Bunny: (01:26)
, you look exactly the same to me, although I’ll have to go back and find, you know, um, I, I need to tell folks. Our guest is Fred Nathan, who is both the founder and the executive director of Think New Mexico, which is a results oriented think tank that serves New Mexicans. But, Fred, you went to my first wedding. I just realized that the other day I was looking at pictures, so, um,

Fred: (01:52)
I was a witness.

Bunny: (01:53)
That was long ago and far away. . But I, we have such limited time. I wanna let people know, um, you know, there’s, if, for people who don’t know what think New Mexico is, I wanna tell our listeners, if you’re wondering how you got the, food tax repealed, how we got the, uh, taxes for, um, folks on Social security repealed, how we got, full-day kindergarten that’s accessible for everybody in the state there. And the list is long, Fred. That’s, those are all initiatives that think New Mexico created. So, I’m curious if you can give us, first tell folks who you are and mm-hmm. , then let’s talk about where the idea for Think New Mexico came from.

Fred: (02:42)
Okay, so I’m the executive director of Think New Mexico and Founder, and we’re a little bit different than most think tanks in a couple of ways. One is most think tanks are either way, way over on the left or way, way over on the right. And we just believe in a state like New Mexico that’s 49th or 50th, unfortunately in too many of these national rankings, that maybe the focus ought to be on practical solutions rather than political ideology. And the other way that we’re different is that we don’t just issue white papers and cross our collective fingers and hope something good happens. We, uh, draft up our recommendations into legislation, and then we recruit sponsors from both sides of the aisle and from both chambers in the legislature, and then we get after it. And with people like You Bunny, uh, we’ve got sort of an army of unpaid volunteers that call and bright their legislators and put a spotlight on these issues, which is enormously helpful. So that’s who we are. We’ve been around for 23 years. And you know, and the other thing I should talk about my board, um, a as I said, we’re, we’re non ideological. Everybody says, you know, they’re nonpartisan, but we really are, we have a board of directors made up of Republicans, Democrats, and independents. So for example, we have a former Republican governor, Gary Carruthers, a former Democratic Attorney General Paul Bardacke. The chair of our board is Roberta Cooper Ramo, the first woman president, American Bar Association. And then we’ve got just a wonderful group of statesmen and stateswomen, everybody from Notah Begay the golfer, who also happens to run a wonderful, uh, foundation that attacks child hunger, to Edward Lujan, who’s a, uh, former Republican party chairman and ran the Luan, uh, insurance agency, uh, one of the largest in the state. Then we have Jackie Baca, who, runs Bueno Foods, is CEO there, and I think they’re the largest exporter in New Mexico. So it’s a good group of statesmen and states, women who have no other agenda than to try to accelerate New Mexico in some of these rankings where we’re 49th or 50th.

Bunny: (05:11)
Well, and you know, I think I told you this, um, maybe when we talked on the phone or when we, when I emailed you, but, um, we, I live in a house where we, there are two political parties represented, and my husband is very conservative, and he says over and over that Fred Nathan, I love hearing him on the, uh, when he hears you on the radio all the time, you know you’re a celebr, a New Mexico celebrity, especially on the air, because your policies are so they seem to be so common sense. Why is it hard to get these things passed?

Fred: (05:53)
That is the a great question. And what we found is invariably when you look at something Bunny that seems obvious, like, we should not be taxing food, we should be providing full day kindergarten, there’s usually some big special interest that stands in the way. I’ll tell you a story. I don’t think I’ve ever told this story publicly about, about the food tax, just to give you an example of this. So that took three years to get repealed, and you’re right, it shouldn’t be so hard. Um, you know, there’s only two states that continue to fully tax food that’s Mississippi and Alabama. But New Mexico has had the food tax since the Great Depression, and back then, um, state government was paid for by property taxes, and of course, property values plummeted during the depression. And Mississippi, the Pioneer State was the first state to say, well, why don’t we start taxing sales? And they started with the food tax and New Mexico was the second state, which might explain, you know, part of the reason why we’re so impoverished. And anyway, it, and when it came in we went and looked at the statute and it came in as an emergency school tax. And of course the emergency was the Great Depression, but the tax endured many years after the depression. And here we were in 2004, scrambling to try to repeal it. And the first year we got the most conservative and the most liberal senators to be our co-sponsors. That was Manny Aragon and Ramsey Gore, who was the chairman of the Republican Party. And they did not like each other at all. And I remember negotiating with their staffs as to whose name would go first on the bill, that’s how crazy it was. Anyway, and we were gonna make up the lost revenue by putting the tax on alcohol and tobacco. And amazingly we got it through the Senate, like 34 to F 34 to five. And I remember people saying, a lobbyist coming up to me from the tobacco companies saying, you know that was miraculous that you got those two people to work together and you got it through, and I’m sorry, I’m gonna have to kill it in the house. And of course, we fought it out, we got assigned to three committees, we got it down to the floor, and then the, then speaker assigned it to a fourth committee on the last day and it died. So I was looking for allies after that in year number two. And I thought, well, maybe the grocers would help us. And I had a, a friend, still a good friend, Joe De Gregorio owns a chain of local grocery stores at Gallup, and he invited me to be the keynote speaker to the Grocers Association.

Fred: (09:07)
And so I got up there and I said to them, I, I probably don’t have this right, but my understanding of the way your business works is that you make a little bit of profit and you, you basically make it on volume. And the CFO F of John Brooks, which was a chain of Albuquerque stores, got up and said, actually, Fred, you have that Exactly right. And, and I said, well, then if you could help us get the tax off of groceries, people’s dollars will go further and they’ll buy more groceries and that’ll be good for you and, and you can help us get the tax off of groceries. And he said, um, well, here’s what you might not understand. When we tax groceries, we get to keep, uh, that tax revenue in our coffers for about two months before we turn it over to the tax department. And I’m usually pretty diplomatic, but I just blurted out to ’em. I said, well, do you mean to say that you think people should continue to pay taxes on their groceries so you can make income off the float and you could hear a pin drop? And I discovered at that moment why we were having so much trouble getting the tax off of groceries anyway, on all the issues we’ve worked on. We, we eventually got it off and, and I think the grocers got to a position of neutrality. But, um, in all of these issues, to answer, this is a very long answer to your question, Bunny. There’s usually at least one very powerful special interest that likes the status quo the way it is. And they usually have more lobbyists and more fire power than we do.

Bunny: (11:05)
Well, it feels to me, just from looking at, at the issues, you know, the initiatives you’ve started and that, and the things that you’ve won, that you really are speaking for people who, who don’t have their own lobbyist. I mean, obviously, um, you know, families who are buying groceries don’t, can’t hire a lobbyist to help them, but I’m, so your, I have read your report on your 10 point plan for rethinking public education. And you know, Toby and I both have gone over the annual report and we’ve, we’ve heard you speak about it, but I, you gotta lay some groundwork. What’s, what’s going on in education in New Mexico and why do we need to fix it?

Fred: (11:48)
Great question again. So, to lay the groundwork, New Mexico is currently ranked last in the quality of education by five different ranking services. And let me see if I can remember them all. Uh, there’s Education Week, there’s Forbes, there’s Kids Count, there’s Wallet Hub, and US News and World Report. And what’s so interesting about this is they all have different criteria, but they’ve come to the same conclusion. So in all candor, I think we’ve hit bottom as a state in terms of the quality of the education. And I don’t mean to depress your listeners. Here’s, here’s something that’s very hopeful and, and what really inspired us to try to tackle this, cuz usually we work on one small discreet issue, like repealing attacks on groceries, trying to reform the education system is, is a whole different animal and much more ambitious than anything we’ve tried. But what inspired us to try is the state of Mississippi. And as you know, there used to be a state, a saying in New Mexico, thank God for Mississippi, right? Because they were right, because they were always 50th and we were 49th. Well, we’ve been watching Mississippi and they’re no longer 50th. We are, they’re in the middle of the pack on a lot of education metrics. So for example, their 29th and fourth grade, um, reading scores their 23rd in fourth grade math scores, and they’ve come in about a dozen years from the back of the pack to the middle of the pack. So that to us, as policy wants, was fascinating. And we did a little investigation of that. And what we dis discovered is there’s a woman there who’s the superintendent of education named Carey Wright. And she came in about 12 years ago, and she’s very apolitical. I don’t know if she’s a democrat or Republican, I don’t think anybody knows, actually. And she came up with a small but ambitious plan with about three prongs, and she drained out the, the politics and just focused on those three things. And we looked at that, and I think what’s significant is not the three things so much is she had a plan and she stuck to it. And we started to think, well, why don’t we develop a plan? Uh, we sort of specialize in boiling out the politics and let’s look for evidence-based things that have worked in other places or maybe in small school districts here in New Mexico that could be expanded to all 89 school districts. And so we’ve actually been for several years, sort of casting around the world looking for these ideas, and we narrowed it down to a list of 10. And in every case, the common denominator is that these are ideas that have moved the needle in terms of student outcomes. And, and we think that they’re achievable here. Maybe not all 10 of once, but we’re gonna try and see if we can do what Carey Wright did in Mississippi here in New Mexico. And the good news is we’ve finding that a lot of these ideas are resonating with legislators and policy makers. And I’m very optimistic that, that we’ll get a bunch through in the 2023 session.

Bunny: (15:27)
So, and you’re really clear that they’re interrelated. I mean, it’s hard to achieve real success with just one of them. I mean, that’s what I understand.

Fred: (15:39)
That’s exactly right. So for example, one of our ideas, not an original Think New Mexico idea, but something that’s worked in a lot of different places is to look at time on task and specifically instructional hours. And we’re, we’re, we’re remarkably low. So for example, in elementary schools right now under state law, elementary schools are required to provide 990 hours of instructional time. That works out to about five and a half hours in 180 day school year. But then a lot gets taken away from that. So for example, time that’s spent on, uh, professional development or, uh, parent teacher conferences is subtracted from that 990 hours. But the students aren’t present for parent-teacher conferences. They’re not present for professional development. So on average, elementary school students are probably getting something less than five hours a day. So we’ve proposed adding about an hour a day, which we would allow the schools to choose however they wanna spend that time. So some schools, for example, might look at our reading scores and we only have about one out of five children at grade level for reading in the elementary schools and what we’d like schools to do. But it’s their choice is to maybe take that additional hour per day and just spend it on literacy and reading. And we think that could make a big difference. But to go to your point Bunny about you can’t just do these things in isolation, if we’re not improving the quality of teaching, that won’t go as far as we would like. So we looked at what have states done to improve the quality of teaching. And one thing that makes a lot of sense is doing these, what are called teacher residencies. Mm-hmm. , uh, just like a doctor. Would you, you wouldn’t want a doctor, uh, performing surgery on you if they hadn’t done a residency and had some practical experience? We just hired Mandy Torres as our new education reform director. I saw she also happens. Yeah. She also happens to be the 2020 New Mexico Teacher of the Year. And Mandy in her preparation she went to Wheelock College in Boston, her last year of college was actually just spent in the classroom with a expert teacher. And then she went to a, uh, school district in Boston where her first year, she wasn’t just given her class, she was thrown in as an assistant teacher. In New Mexico, when you get your teaching license, you don’t get a residency, you just get thrown in and sink or swim. And so one of the things that we’re proposing is that every new teacher in New Mexico, and there’s about a thousand be provided a, um, residency mm-hmm. . So they’re not just thrown in sink or swim, but they’re given a chance to observe and to, to learn in effect on the job in the same way a doctor would. So that, those are two examples of things that we think go together

Bunny: (19:17)
Well. And it seems to me that that also goes along with revamping the College of Education, right? I mean, those, those two, those two things seem to be almost…

Fred: (19:28)
Yeah. You’re exactly right. And when we talked to teachers, when we were putting this report together, we talked to teachers from all over the state, and we were hearing the same things. So for example, many teachers complained that the people that were teaching them in the College of Education had actually not taught themselves in the classroom ever. They were mostly researchers. So we want to change that and make it a requirement that if you teach at one of the eight colleges of education in New Mexico, that you have at least three years of experience actually teaching in the classroom. The other complaint that we heard was everything that they were learning was very theoretical. And so when we suggested, well, maybe the fourth year could be a residency, uh, that was uniformly very highly received. So that’s another thing that we’re gonna propose in terms of changing the colleges of education. We think they’ll be pretty receptive because it, as you know from reading the report, there’s a chart in there showing the declining enrollment in the colleges of education, and they need to change it up. And this would be a good way to do it, is to, uh, revamp their curriculum, make it more practical and frankly, higher faculty that have that experience that many of their current faculty don’t have in terms of actually having taught in the classroom themselves.

Bunny: (20:59)
So tell, so I know there are schools in New Mexico that are doing, where education is actually happening. I mean, I feel like I come from one of those districts. I know those eastern, those small schools on the east side are an example of what can work really well. I’m curious to know what they’re doing differently.

Fred: (21:21)
Another great question. So the school district that I love is just, as you describe it, a small district on the east side. It’s about 600 students. It’s called Texico, New Mexico.

Bunny: (21:34)
Oh, my. They’re so good. And, and they’ll, they’ll beat you in basketball as well, .

Fred: (21:39)
Well, I was gonna get to that actually, cuz my son plays for a high school Santa Fe Prep that plays Texico. But let me go back and, and we’ll come back around to that. So several summers ago, I took our college interns and I gave them a project and I said, you know, I know there are pockets of excellence in New Mexico. Let’s look at the 89 school districts, and I want you to identify the best districts of the state for me, and let’s find out what their secret sauce is. And this is what led to Texico. So they did and I left it up to them how to, how to go about this project. So they got all the metrics, they got all the data on the highest performing school districts in reading and in math and in graduation rates. And the district that popped off the page for them was Texico.

Fred: (22:33)
I’d never heard of Texico. And they said, look at this district. They’re number three. And in reading proficiency, they’re four, and this is consistent over a long period of time. So it’s not just a snapshot. And they’re, they’re very, and over a long period of time, they’re always at the top in graduation rates. So I said, well, maybe get me, get me the, um, the demographics because maybe this is a very wealthy area and maybe that explains it. So they got the census data, and lo and behold, uh, the average family income in Texico is about $10,000 less than the average for New Mexico. And at this point, I was sold and I said, let’s take a field trip. And, and this comes to your point, when, when I got out there, I was so excited about them. My wife said, I wanna come on this field trip. So we went out there and I discovered many things. One is that they excelled not just in the classroom, but as you point out, they excelled at sports. They, I saw the trophy case. Interestingly, they only put, because they have so many trophies, they only put their first place trophies. My son’s school, which is an independent school, and the tuitions now $25,000 a year, they put every trophy on their trophy case because it’s so rare that we win at state . But for Texaco, this is an everyday occurrence. But the thing that struck us the most is when we got out there, and actually 600 students makes Texaco actually in the, in the middle for size. But yet, when I got out there, the first person I’d met was the superintendent. And he has two people on the staff an HR person and chief financial officer, and a clerical person. That’s it. And so we immediately fell into a discussion about that, and I quickly un figured out why they do so well. I said, you know, you, you have a very small staff, you know, I, I know school districts, uh, that are smaller than you that have, you know, five times the staff you do. And the, the superintendent explained, well, our philosophy is to take the money that we received from the state in the funding formula and push it down to the classroom. He said, where the actual learning takes place. And that was just an, you know, it, it sounded like common sense. And when I talked to the school board there and others, the school board member says well, doesn’t everybody do this? And I said, well, actually, I’m from Santa Fe. And the answer is no. And if you look at aps, uh, the Albuquerque Public Schools, they have a gigantic office building in Albuquerque filled with central office administrators.

Fred: (25:46)
And so what really struck us, bottom line, and we learned a lot from Texico, and we’d like every district to replicate that philosophy of pushing the money down to where the learning takes place. So we came back and we did a study of the 89 school districts, and what we discovered was 61 of the 89 districts over a 10 year period actually grew central administrative spending faster than school site spending, which is just astonishing to us. And we’ve been trying to pass a bill for the last four or five years modeled on Texaco to say that the public education department should not approve any district budget that grows central administrative spending faster than classroom spending. And you, you’d be amazed at the resistance, and of course it’s coming from the New Mexico Superintendents Association and the School Boards Association, because if we are successful and pass this bill, it will take power away from them, uh, and give it to people that really don’t have a voice. The students and the parents that wanna see their taxpayer dollars spent words gonna have the most impact, which is at the school sites. And that brings us to another idea, which is we looked at how we pay principals. Now principals, it turns out, are perhaps the most important people in the entire system. Mm-hmm. , but very poorly paid relative to central office administrators who have much less, uh, responsibility on balance and tier three teachers. In fact, we found several instances in New Mexico where a teacher was paid more than a principal. And yet we wonder why we have so much difficulty attracting people to become principles. And here too, they’re also not getting the training that they need. And we looked at the, the average, uh, principle training relative to other states, and it’s very small. It’s about 180 hours where you would learn from a mentor principal. Uh, in other states, it’s, it’s several multiples of that. So we want to both increase principal pay, increase their training before they assume a principalship.

Bunny: (28:21)
So, um, and, and this seems really obvious, but obvious, you know, it seems that the, um, smaller the classroom, perhaps the smaller the budget, the smaller the, um, school district, the better the results are. But it doesn’t sound like that’s a given.

Fred: (28:37)
It’s not it. Um, and Bunny, remind me, you’re from Logan, New Mexico.

Bunny: (28:42)
Yes.

Fred: (28:44)
Yes. So here’s another thing that came out of that study that you’ll really appreciate. So when we looked at the highest performing districts in New Mexico and also looked at size of district, we were astonished to see of the top 15 performing academic districts, 13 of them were very small, very small. And the, the high performing big, the, the only two that were big were not all that big, uh, Los Alamos. And of course we know why that is. Two parent households, uh, both parents are PhDs, uh, with six figure salaries. And then the other quote unquote big district was Rio Rancho. Now, Rio Rancho has an interesting history. They broke away from Albuquerque public schools about 25 years ago. And when they did, uh, we have the news clippings, the APS school board members said, well, this is gonna be a disaster. They don’t have the property base, blah, blah, blah. But in reality, when they broke away, they started performing much, much better. So one of our proposals actually is to de consolidate aps and replicate what happened at Rio Rancho. And APS really personifies something, and it is not just New Mexico, but all across the country, is that in the 1940s and thereabouts and, and starting earlier, uh, a lot of school systems across the country started to think, well, bigger must be better. And they were trying to copy the industrial revolution and the idea of factories and economies of scale. And so they, um, consolidated a lot of these small school districts. And in fact, in New Mexico, we used to have 900 school districts, if you go back to territorial days. And we consolidated and consolidated. In fact, I found a book written by the Dean of Education at U N M, and this was in the 1940s that he wrote it. And he said that New Mexico suffers, uh, because we’re a sparsely populated state. And what we need to do is consolidate small school districts. That’s exactly wrong. And we would fight against ever consolidating these small school districts, because as I pointed out earlier, they’re actually the ones that are performing at a very high level. And you’re the embodiment of this and the education you received at Logan, uh, Bunny. But what we’d like to do is de consolidate APS, which is about 72,000 students. Wow. We found some really excellent research done by a business school professor at UCLA who pointed out and documented that school districts in terms of academic performance sort of hit a ceiling at about 15,000 students. And he says that’s actually sort of optimal because you, you do get those efficiencies, but at the same time, the kids don’t feel like they’re on a conveyor belt and they’re getting these cookie cutter budgets and hiring practices and so forth, but they’re getting, uh, an education that’s tailored to them and their academic needs.

Fred: (32:08)
So we would split APS up, and you’re right the smaller school districts do much, much better academically. And then you look at school size, and that’s also an area where there’s a lot of misunderstanding. So in New Mexico, we have this fund that helps districts pay for new school construction. And unfortunately it’s been used by APS to build in the last decade, two high schools that are 2000 students. Um, volcano Vistas one, and I’m blanking on the other one, um, that’s not in the best interest of students. There’s about four decades of research that shows that high schools shouldn’t be any larger than about 900 students. Middle schools and elementary schools shouldn’t be any larger than about 400 students. And so what we’ve pointed out to the legislature is this fund is just a political formula for spreading money around the state, but shouldn’t we also be looking at academic outcomes? Because if you do that, you wouldn’t be funding these very large schools that turn into dropout factories. Um, and I often say, you know, the, this whole notion that we should build schools like factories would make a lot of sense if kids were widgets and didn’t have these emotions and other needs, uh, that widgets, you know, don’t have. But anyway, um, that’s, that’s where we are. So we’re, we’re also trying to change that formula. So we start to build our schools smaller. And then you have this issue of, uh, class size and the research there is more mixed. It really doesn’t matter if you go from say, 22 students to 18 students. It matters a lot though. If you go from 40 students to 20 students, then you see an increase in student outcomes. New Mexico actually has a very good law about class sizes that has sort of a sliding scale and they get larger as the kids get older. But they start, you know, uh, fairly small. The problem is that, uh, the law grants district’s waivers, and it’s very easy to get these waivers. And so we’d like to tighten up that waiver system so it’s not just, um, something that’s just handed out like water. Uh, that, that you really have to document a need for a waiver, uh, because I think some districts have gotten lazy and rather than going out and hiring enough teachers, they just apply to the public education department cuz they know it’s automatic. And we wanna say, no you’ve gotta show that you’ve made an effort and you haven’t been able to hire these teachers.

Bunny: (35:06)
So I’m also curious, and I don’t exactly understand this one, but can you talk, talk about charter schools for a minute. You know, my daughter was, she was the social worker at Cottonwood, which is a, has been a very successful charter school in Albuquerque. And I’m just curious, what’s, what’s the pushback against charter schools? I hate to be ignorant, but…

Fred: (35:29)
Yeah, I think the pushback is that the traditional public schools see this as competition. And when the charter school movement was started, this was actually not the idea. It was supposed to be a collaborative effort that the charter schools would, um, have less restrictions on them and they would be given more freedom to experiment. And some charter schools would fail and others would be wildly successful. And that’s essentially, if you look across the country, what’s happened, you have some high, high performing charter schools. We have them in New Mexico, you mentioned Cottonwood, they would be an example. And then you have some charter schools that frankly, um, have failed. And the idea was that the traditional public schools would look at the successful, uh, charter schools and adopt some of their practices, and then it would be a race to the top. What’s happened in New Mexico is it’s just been all out war, uh, between the charters and the traditional public schools. And that’s really unfortunate from the standpoint of raising student achievement. So what we’ve proposed here is why don’t we close the underperforming charter schools? And it’s nearly impossible once a charter school is opened to shut them down. And we gave the example of a charter school in Albuquerque where the reading and math proficiencies are around 8%. They’re in the single digits. The two founders, a husband and wife team have paid themselves an exorbitant salary and bought themselves some fancy cars. And this is really not the purpose of charter schools. So there have been efforts commendably to shut them down, but the law is, makes it so difficult. And when I asked around why the PEC, that’s the public education committee, uh, or commission hasn’t shut them down, one theory is that it would set a precedent. And that maybe if you could shut down bad charter schools that folks like think New Mexico might move on to shutting down bad traditional public schools.

Fred: (37:48)
And that’s why there’s such this aversion, uh, to closing down this particularly bad school. Um, it might happen on its own because over time the enrollment has declined, but we really shouldn’t wait for that to happen. When, when schools are underperforming at this rate, they should, it should be easier to shut them down. And on the opposite end of the spectrum, you have these very, uh, high performing charter schools. We have one, I’m gonna blank on the name now, maybe it’s Moss uh, Cottonwood. One of them is just, um, like in the top 10 nationally of all charter schools in the country. And this one particular school would like to expand. They’re in Albuquerque. They tried to expand into another district and it was fought tooth and nail by the district. And we’d like to, you know if you’ve got a proven track record and you are outperforming, uh, let’s make it easier, uh, for you to open up a series of these campuses. Because after all, it should be about boosting student achievement. And if you’ve got a record of success, why wouldn’t we want to replicate that? A another thing that we’d like to do with charter schools, and this is sort of ironic, but um, charter schools in New Mexico, if you want your child to go there, you, you apply through a lottery. And what happens is that parents that tend to be higher educated learn how to game the system. They apply it, multiple charter schools, high performing, and then you look at the demographics of the charter schools and oftentimes it’s not always representative of the state. But when we talked to charter school people, they said, you know, we’re stuck with this system. We’d like to have a demographic that’s representative of the state. So to put that in context, about three quarter, three quarters of the students that go to public schools in New Mexico are classified as at risk, meaning lower income.

Bunny: (40:04)
Did you say three quarters?

Fred: (40:06)
Three quarters. 74.8%. And so, so, you know, a typical charter school might be 60% at risk, which is not wealthy by any means of course, but it’s not at the statewide averages. But a lot of these people that run charter schools are very public spirited, want to, to help in any way possible, but they’re stuck with this lottery system. So, uh, what some other states have done with the similar issue is allowed, uh, charter schools to overweight the number of at-risk students that they take. And, um, we think they should be allowed to do that. Right now, that’s prohibited. So that’s another reform that we’d like to do. But the basic reform is make it easier to shut bad schools, make it easier to open high performing schools, which we think, uh, I think you used the term common sense earlier. Funny. We think that’s a common sense right idea. But we are expecting a firestorm of opposition, uh, from superintendents, from some superintendents and some school board members.

Bunny: (41:16)
So, I know we’re, we’ve gone a little over time. I hope you have time to answer just a couple more questions. I sure. So is the answer ever, I mean, I always hear this Well, we, we never, ever, ever pay our teachers enough. Is is that that one of our problems? Or is that, what’s that?

Fred: (41:37)
No, um, to the legislature’s credit, they have raised teachers salaries. You know, that we have this marvelous boom going on with oil and gas right now in New Mexico and some of that, a good portion of that has been funneled into increasing teacher salaries such that we are now competitive with every state in our region. Oh, good. And, and, and frankly, we have enough teachers. Uh, the problem is they’re not always in the right places. We could use more special ed teachers, we could use more teachers in the rural areas of the state. So we’ve gotta do a better job of distributing the teachers, but I think paying them more has resulted in stopping the shortage. We don’t have a shortage. Most states do. But we, we also have to focus on the colleges of education as we dis discussed earlier, and increasing the quality of the teaching and preparation for teachers.

Bunny: (42:45)
So Fred, what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna put a link to your report with these materials for this podcast. And we’ll also do, I’ve done this before, I wanna write a blog post about it so that people have access. You know, people, some people don’t listen to podcasts, so we’ll maybe you and I can work together on a blog post, but, what can people do? I mean, I know I’m always happy to donate money to think New Mexico, cuz I know you’re superstars in the realm of helping new Mexicans. But what else can they do besides contribute?

Fred: (43:22)
Um, contributions always welcome. But just as important and maybe more important is they can go bunny to our action center on our website and contact their legislators. And I’m not a technology person, but the way this works is there’s a pre-scripted letter, let’s say you’re interested in these ideas on reforming our K-12 system and you can edit that letter any way you choose. And we encourage that we have no pride of authorship. And these letters, uh, go to your legislators and the governor and the lieutenant governor and they’re very impactful, especially when people write about their own personal experience. And everybody has an experience with the K-12 system here. And, uh, so that would be very helpful. And I know legislators find this personal testimony from their constituents very compelling. The other thing the computer does is you don’t even have to know who your state senator is or your state representative. You just type in your address and the computer spits out who your state senator is and automatically addresses it. You don’t have to pay for a stamp, you just press send and it goes directly to their emails.

Bunny: (44:42)
Well, Fred, I’m so, I’m so honored that you took some time to talk to us, but I’m also, and I’m so proud of you for, for doing this thing. I mean, you’re not a New Mexico native, you came from New York and yet you are spending your life making a difference here. So I just, I just wanna say thanks. I’m proud to know you.

Fred: (45:05)
Well, Bunny, thank you. I feel the same way about you and I know what you’re doing to promote this state and hopefully your listeners know as well. And I appreciate what you’re doing, to help both think New Mexico and the state as a whole.

Bunny: (45:19)
And can I just tell you guys, I wanna tell the listeners, not only is think New Mexico an amazing think tank. They have the best baseball caps in the state. You still have those Fred?

Fred: (45:31)
. We absolutely do. And they’re free to our contributors and they come in six different colors. And if you don’t have a full set by now, Bunny, I’d be surprised.

Bunny: (45:42)
I have, I got out a white one. I was gonna put it on. I’ll take a picture with my think New Mexico cap. But folks, this is, this is a really easy way to make a difference and I’m just saying in five years we’ll be Mississippi. I’m hoping that we’ll be number 30 and then number 25, let’s climb out of this hole.

Fred: (46:03)
And you know, if they can do it, I know we can do it. Yeah. We have the same challenges, but we have some advantages they don’t have. And so you’re absolutely right. We, there’s no reason why give us a dozen years, we couldn’t get to maybe 25th or 20th.

Bunny: (46:21)
That’s exciting. That’s exciting. Fred, thank you so much. Check out the links because I want you to know what’s going on and I want you to have a voice in your kids and your grandkids education. It’s really important.

Fred: (46:34)
Many thanks, Bunny.

Bunny: (46:35)
You’re very welcome.