New school head defends Baldridge system

By Bill Donovan
Staff writer

GALLUP — Last night local county public school board officials once again asked the question that many parents in this school district ask: Why are the high schools here graduating students who can’t read or do math?

The answer, at least in the minds of two of the school board members, may rest with the decision by officials for the Gallup-McKinley County Public District five years ago to embrace the Baldridge system.

Both Genevieve Jackson and Annie Descheny had little good to say about the system at Tuesday’s school board meeting, explaining that they had received a lot of feedback from teachers who complained that it required them to spend too much time doing paperwork and not enough time actually teaching.

“When I look at the fact that we are graduating students who can’t read, that’s almost criminal,” Jackson said.

But Superintendent Esther Macias defended the system, saying it wasn’t the system that was at fault but the way the district was trying to implement it.

“We’re trying to implement it too quickly,” she said, adding the district has been spending its time training the principals on how to implement and haven’t spend enough time training the teachers.

She also explained that the old way of teaching just does not cut it anymore.

Under the old system, a teacher would get up there and lecture, there would be some class discussion but the teacher wouldn’t have an idea if individual students grasped the material until the final exam and by that time, if he or she didn’t, it was too late to go back and teach it.

Under the Baldridge system, she said, teachers have an opportunity to learn as the lesson is taught whether the student is having problems grasping all or part of the subject being taught and can then take steps to see that the students work on those parts to learn it.

But Jackson pointed out that the system has been in place for four years and all of the schools in the district except for David Skeets Elementary have failed to make Adequate Annual Progress.

That’s true, said Macias, but the district plans to change that by bringing the current system down to the teacher and making it simpler so it does not increase the teacher’s paperwork.

She pointed out the district’s key mistake may have been in trying to implement the program throughout the district. The Albuquerque School District is implementing it in only four schools — two of which have made AYP — and the Zuni School District is implementing it slowly.

Descheny said she didn’t like seeing the district using the Navajo students as “guinea pigs” for a system that hasn’t proved it can be successful here. This made her think too much of the tribe’s past when officials for the Indian Health Service used Navajo children as guinea pigs for drug tests.

“Now it turns out that our children have been used by the district as guinea pigs of this program for the past four years,” she said. “This is too long.”

While the discussion lasted for more than half an hour, it ended with the board taking no action or indicating it was going to take action to do away with the Baldridge system. For right now, it appears that the school board plans to allow Macias to carry through with her plan to simplify the program.