PED Launches ‘Innovation Zones’ To Rethink High School

Submitted by Carol A. Clark
on July 21, 2022
- 7:03 pm

Public Education Secretary Kurt Steinhaus

NMPED News:

SANTA FE — The Public Education Department (PED) has identified 20 New Mexico high schools that will serve as “Innovation Zones” where the traditional education model will be transformed to improve the high school experience and academic outcomes to best serve the local community.

The research-supported project capitalizes on innovations already in place in many New Mexico school districts that focus on workplace learning, Career and Technical Education and a range of support services to make sure students become workforce and college-ready.

The goal is to identify best practices that can spread across the state over time in order to improve graduation rates by making high school more relevant and exciting to students on the cusp of adulthood.

“This pilot project recognizes and builds on work that’s been going on across New Mexico for decades to enhance the high school experience,” Public Education Secretary Kurt Steinhaus said. “These schools are already leaders in this work. Now they’ll officially serve as incubators where new strategies can grow, evolve and flourish.”

Innovation Zone schools will receive intensive professional development, guidance and technical assistance along with awards ranging from $150,000 to $750,000 to implement a re-imagined school experience that includes leadership teams and work-based and experiential learning. The funding was included in the 2022 General Appropriations Bill to support Career and Technical Education initiatives.

Altogether, the 20 schools serve more than 16,700 students who will be the first in the state to experience a new high school model – or models – that expand educational pathways to college and career. The goal is to identify best practices that can spread across the state over time.

The awardees include eight school districts:

Alamogordo,
Aztec (two schools)
Hatch Valley (two schools)
Hobbs, Las Cruces (six schools)
Rio Rancho (four schools)
Silver City
Zuni

Two charter schools will also be Innovation Zones: ACE Leadership High School, Health Leadership High School, both in Albuquerque.

“We are starting with known best-practices that emphasize college and career readiness and workplace learning, but those are just starting points,” Steinhaus said. “We are on a search for new strategies to help every New Mexico student complete high school and be successful in life.”

The Innovation Zone strategy is intended to improve New Mexico’s graduation rate (76.8 percent) and other measures and predictors of academic success:

High school graduates enrolling in college (now 61 percent)
High school students pursuing a sequence of Career Technical Education courses (now 16 percent)
High school students enrolled in work-based learning (now 3.8 percent)
High school students enrolled in dual credit courses (now 15 percent).

The pilot project fulfills a recommendation made in February in a report by the New Mexico Public Education Department and the Los Alamos National Laboratory Foundation. That report applauded disparate efforts across New Mexico to improve the high school experience and provide better college and career preparation, but it called for a comprehensive approach that can be scaled up to reach a critical mass of New Mexico high schools.

“While these attempts provide highly useful local examples of promising practices, they have fallen short of redesigning high schools in ways that engage all students,” the report said. “In essence, we cannot shuffle the cards and hope for a better deal; we must call for a new game, one that builds on our communities’ wealth and does not seek to further marginalize their potential.”

Results of the pilot would guide the design of a statewide plan that shifts how education agencies and schools approach college and career preparation and ultimately how students are supported throughout their education journey.

That study pointed to innovative practices already occurring in New Mexico schools and recommended parallel and interconnected actions that schools, districts, tribes and the state should take to expand these practices statewide.

Schools awarded the Innovation Zone designation will work closely with their communities to determine how the local public education system should serve that community. Each Innovation Zone will create a local Profile of a Graduate – a document that spells out the community’s expectations for those earning high school diplomas. Innovation Zone schools then will align all high school experiences with this profile.

Applications were evaluated based on ability to perform the transformation work and the number of students served, with regional and cultural diversity as a priority.

Successful applications also addressed these seven core elements: