Denish on Education

News New Mexico reviewed the 572 words on Diane Denish’s position page on education.

    Diane Denish (left) says the key to getting a good-paying job and achieving dreams is a quality education. Below is a summary of the Denish campaign’s major points on how she sees ways for improvement in education.
    1. Denish points to her role in the creation of the Children’s Cabinet, which she says brings together representatives from Cabinet departments, non-profit organizations and the courts to assist education.
    2. Denish is an advocate of early childhood education. She talks of the creation and expansion of a state program which provided access to quality education for more than 1,400 children. She indicates the pre-K program has received national praise for having a “significant and meaningful impact on children’s early language, literacy, and mathematical development.”
    3. Denish concedes that still too many New Mexico children are falling behind and are either not graduating with the skills they need to compete – or not graduating at all. In response, she highlights her push for the Centennial Graduates Initiative and she continues to hold graduation summits across the state. She believes these summits help students see a pathway to graduation and beyond.

    4. Denish says the fight will not end until every single child in New Mexico has the opportunity achieve his or her dreams.

    5. Denish claims to have personally spoken to thousands of New Mexico High School students and asked them to pledge to finish high school. Denish has been involved in an America's Promise Alliance Graduation Summit in New Mexico to call attention to the need to improve graduation rates statewide. The Summit convened more than 500 stakeholders including young people, educators, lawmakers, administrators, the business community, non-profits, and others to come up with ideas and action plans to address critical issues.

    6. Denish says she believes that in order for our children to be successful in school, and in the workforce, they must develop good habits of exercise and nutrition. For this reason she fought to obtain funding for a program that connects New Mexico farmers with local schools to make sure our children have fresh produce. Diane supported legislation to fund more than 200 additional physical education teachers in our schools, and led the effort to expand school-based health centers across the state. There are now 75 school-based health centers in New Mexico that ensure our children and their families have access to behavioral and physical health services.

    7. Denish says she believes that our high schools and technical schools must do more to prepare our students to compete for 21st Century jobs. She points to her efforts to expand programs at career technical centers and vocational charter high schools.
    News New Mexico sees position point # 4, “The fight will not end until every single child in New Mexico has the opportunity achieve his or her dreams,” as the best illustration of the overriding governing philosophy behind the Denish approach to education. News New Mexico would take issue with this basic premise and suggest:
1. Every single child already has the "opportunity" to achieve his or her dreams.
2. It would seem that the real fight is not for opportunities, but rather for CONTROL of the resources the state has to spend on public education.

3. Since parents (not government) have the most influence on children, parents will always have primary responsibility for encouraging their children to capitalize on their educational opportunities. The state’s attempts to take partial responsibility for parenting have created a long list of programs that waste resources.

4. The dropout rates in New Mexico indicate an astonishing percentage of children who have not been convinced by their parents to see learning and education as an opportunity worth capitalizing on.

5. After a child’s parents, classroom teachers and coaches are the next most important centers of influence on children. Empowering classroom teachers instead of designers of elaborate government programs makes the most sense as a BEST PRACTICE.

    In the end, the programs Denish highlights are mostly initiatives conceived and directed from Santa Fe. While the motives of the programs are virtuous, the premise of treating symptoms far away from parent's battle lines of educating their children has fatal flaws. Accordingly, perhaps except for providing more direct resources to vocational charter high schools and career technical learning centers, the chances of any of these programs improving the parent-child educational encouragement relationship are slim.
    This position paper emphasizes six efforts made by Denish to improve education. Most of these efforts involve some sort of state-funding and/or state government management of programs. Clearly the Denish emphasis is on a central planning approach (Santa Fe leading) to educational problem-solving. The implementation of these initiatives tends to begin with gathering up taxpayer resources in Santa Fe. Next some downstream input is collected. This is followed by the creation of bureaucratic administrative positions. Finally the programs funnel resources left over after salaries and other bureaucracy overhead have been absorbed.

Denish on Education