A 20-year veteran educator is exposing how, she says, failed policies have driven New Mexico into one of the worst-ranked education systems in the country in a documentary released by Independent Women Features. Paula Edwards* has spent her whole life watching the New Mexico school system fail students and believes this is leading to the state’s low literacy rates.
Neeraja Deshpande, a senior contributor to IWF, sees Give Teachers A Break: The Hidden Crisis Inside New Mexico’s Classrooms as a small window into a failing education system being accepted across the country.
“If we’re just giving them crutches in their entire education,” Deshpande, a policy analyst for Independent Women, said exclusively to Washington Examiner. “We’re not going to have a healthy society.”
First cracks in New Mexico’s educational failures
Edwards said she realized the failures of the New Mexico school system she grew up in early on. Her cousin struggled moving to Texas because the education system in New Mexico left her far behind her peers.
“My cousin was very, very, very far behind,” Edwards said. “When it came time for her to graduate from high school, she could not pass the high school equivalency exam.”
Chronic absence
During the COVID-19 pandemic, New Mexico lost track of over 100,000 children. The rate of chronically absent students in New Mexico jumped 119% by 2023. New Mexico now ranks as the state with the highest chronic absence rate.
Edwards had a student who was only at school for 64 of 177 days. The school district told her she had to pass the student to the next grade, even though she had not completed any schoolwork.
“My grade book has zeros,” Edwards said. “But they told me, ‘No, you have to pass her to the next grade.’ She could not meet any of the grade standards, but I was required to pass her. She didn’t pass the state test. She couldn’t, but I had to pass her.”
Indoctrination over education
“New Mexico is a transgender sanctuary state,” Edwards said. “As a teacher, if I worked in the local school district, I would be required to socially transition a child as young as five.”
The state of New Mexico stripped teachers and counselors of all conscientious and religious objections.
“If a Billy came in and he decided he wanted to be Bonnie,” Edwards said, “I would be required to socially transition that child without informing the parent.”
Deshpande warns that this is not just a New Mexico problem and these cases are popping up all over the country.
“Teachers can’t prescribe cross sex hormones,” Deshpande said. “But what teachers can do is constantly affirm a delusion.”
Deshpande believes the psychological aspect ultimately grooms children into seeking medical transition.
“When schools say ‘We’re not medically transitioning kids,’ what they’re actually saying is, ‘We’re just psychologically transitioning them.’” Deshpande said. “What the teacher is actually doing is creating this psychological and social reality that eventually becomes a medical reality.”
Edwards is frustrated by the focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion; pronouns; and gender ideology at the expense of teaching children the basics.
“School is not for indoctrination,” Edwards said. “School is for getting our kids to read and write and do math, and that’s it. If we don’t fix it… the way they choose to build a prison is by looking at third grade boys’ reading tests. Here in New Mexico, we’re building a lot of prisons.”
Lack of consequences
Edwards outlines the lack of authority teachers have in disciplining students and the prevalence of disruptive behavior in classrooms. One particular instance led her to leave her job as a school teacher.
“I had a student in my classroom, in second grade, not even potty trained, and he was wearing diapers,” Edwards said. “When he got angry, he would just pull feces out of his diaper and wipe it on everyone because he wanted out of the classroom. We could not give consequences.”
Deshpande blamed federal directives from the Obama administration, followed by those of the Biden administration, for strangling teachers’ ability to discipline student behavior.
“If you discipline the student, that’s racism, that’s like classism,” Deshpande said. “All these really, really ridiculous policies need to go.”
Dysfunction is a choice
While Edwards left the classroom and now works as an instructional coach, she still believes New Mexico can reform the education system in three easy steps: Requiring attendance, reinstating teacher certification tests, and removing indoctrination from the classroom and returning to the basics.
“DEI in education is not a good thing,” Edwards said. “It is bad that we’re teaching pronouns over reading, writing, and math.”
“Decline is a choice, and dysfunction is a choice,” Deshpande said. “When you look at states that have been historically ranked really poorly in education, like Mississippi and Louisiana, they actually looked at their numbers, they looked at their rankings. They thought, ‘we need to fix this,’ and they have been.”
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Deshpande says “common sense reforms,” such as holding students to high standards academically, holding back students who are failing, and holding students accountable for their actions, are the first step in fixing the broken school system.
“We need to acknowledge that there’s no discrimination in disciplining kids,” Deshpande said.
*pseudonym used to protect the subject’s identity