Things That Can Be Blamed on the New Mexico Public Education Department
- Higher graduation rates
- Any K-12 success found anywhere in New Mexico, at anytime from 1988 to present, and for any reason
Things That Can NOT Be Blamed on the New Mexico Public Education Department
- Anything other than #1 and #2 above, including, but not limited to: inaccurate teacher evaluation reports; misleading and constantly changing teacher/principal evaluation criteria; poor End of Course test implementation; confusing/incorrect teacher certification information; Teachscape; the clip photos on Teachscape; a complete inability to provide adequate communication to districts, individual teachers or website users; rising needs for college remediation as actual academic standards for high school are lowered in a pitiful attempt to raise the graduation rate; our ubiquitously irritating holier-than-thou attitude toward everyone else involved in education, including parents; a knee-jerk tendency to blame everyone but the New Mexico Public Education Department; and, our blatantly simple Karl Rovian strategy to manipulate/control all K-12 education story narrative by releasing glossed/positive-spin information first to the Albuquerque Journal instead of districts/administrators/teachers, thus putting all such spin on Page One, while all stories pointing out what a load of crap we’ve been dishing out is harder to find and appears as whiny nitpicking.
It is hoped this short primer has been found useful. Those with further questions can easily find answers via our website. If you can’t, it’s your fault, not ours, as the primer clearly points out.
Burque Babble 
Below a draft of my letter to the Abq. Journal:
As a teacher, the slew of stories about the flawed teacher evaluation system is of great interest to me. Clearly this system was rushed and done poorly. There is little reason to believe the results–even when revised.
In every story the PED is very quick to blame the districts for bad data. As confusing as the system is, I have to believe the districts did their very best to comply with the PED requests.
The PED is ultimately responsible for the evaluations. It’s time for the PED to admit that they did not perform their due diligence with the evaluations. If they were given faulty or incomplete data, then the PED should have requested complete data before issuing the evaluations.
This is a bit like doing one’s taxes on TurboTax. You run the error check before submitting it to the IRS. If there are problems, you take the responsibility to fix them. Don’t blame the bank for the missing 1099 form.
The PED needs to put on its big-boy pants and admit that the responsibility for the accuracy of evaluations belongs solely to the PED.
Nice. VERY nice. I especially love the Turbo Tax analogy.
[…] almost all the time (e.g., picking Spain over Netherlands in the World Cup). So when I write a little something two days ago about how NM PED perceives what might, possibly, be its own fault, it’s reassuring and fun to come across the following […]