Revisionist history: New Mexico Democrats claim state IS NOT last in education

If you don’t like the results, just change the way those results are reported. That seems to be the MO for New Mexico Democrats and the government education system. After two straight cycles of being dead last in all four categories of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, (click here for 2025 results and here for  the 2022 results) New Mexico education “blob” which includes school superintendents and Democrat legislators (to name two) wants to change the narrative. They don’t actually want to change the education system, just the narrative.

This is all covered in a Santa Fe New Mexican article. The article does include a link to the report which is somewhat incomprehensible. Mostly, the claim is that New Mexico’s test has higher proficiency standards than those of neighboring states which makes it look as if New Mexico is doing worse than others. We have no dog in that fight as we have never used state tests because they change so often.

However, the claim is made in the article that the NAEP (which we use and is called the Nation’s Report Card) sample size of 3,500 students per state is too small.

We don’t buy it. We’ll see if New Mexico’s NAEP scores improve in the next round of testing, but until then all of this is noise. New Mexico and its largest districts (including Albuquerque Public Schools) have done SOME work around the edges. Will it be enough to bring New Mexico out of last place? Only time and the next round of NAEP testing will tell, not this report. We’ll stick with the nationally-respected “gold standard” NAEP test used by literally everyone (including the liberal Annie E. Casey Foundation in their annual Kids Count report).