In April, New Mexico launched a tutoring effort with all the “high-impact” elements experts say lead to success: small groups, led by a trained tutor for 90 minutes of instruction spread throughout the week.
It was the third attempt in two years.
With the school year winding down, some districts never even got word the program existed. Those that participated quickly scrambled to cram it into their schedules.
“The timing wasn’t optimal,” said Matt Montaño, superintendent of the Bernalillo Public Schools, north of Albuquerque, and one of just five districts out of the state’s 89 to sign up. Staff members, he said, were “a little bit less than enthusiastic” about the interruption.
The late rollout was only the most recent snag in the state’s troubled effort to spend millions in federal relief funds for tutoring before the deadline to use the money hits next month.
The first attempt — with an on-demand, virtual provider — met with a meager response from families. A second try never got off the ground because of a contract mishap the state still won’t fully explain. And the delayed start on the third effort means only a fraction of the students slated for tutoring got it. State officials estimate that between 2,000 and 3,000 students received the extra help — far less than the 8,000 they were hoping to reach.
“Clearly, it was not the best,” Amanda DeBell, New Mexico’s deputy education secretary, said of the condensed program. But in July, the legislature pumped new life into the effort, providing $8.5 million for high-dosage tutoring this fall. The state also plans to use what’s left of the $4 million in federal relief funds that they’d hoped to spend last school year to support math tutoring for middle school students.
Data shows New Mexico students still have a lot of ground to make up to combat pandemic learning loss. The state ranked last in fourth grade math and reading in the most recent iteration of the National Assessment of Educational Progress.
The experience underscores the difficulty of pulling off a statewide tutoring effort — even one backed by convincing research and millions of dollars in federal relief funds.
At a May tutoring conference at Stanford University, Education Secretary Arsenio Romero spoke candidly about the state’s false starts.
“Sometimes we as educators are our own worst enemies,” he said. “We go through year-long cycles before we … make changes. You need to be able to pivot.”