To Confirm or Not Confirm; New Mexico's Hanna Skandera

For a little more than a week, the New Mexico Senate Rules Committee in Albuquerque has been debating the confirmation of Hanna Skandera as New Mexico's Secretary of Education. Many committee members, teachers (current and retired), and administrators have concerns about Skandera's lack of experience in education, as well as her recent overruling of New Mexico's Public Education Department's stance on the use of public funds for private schools.

Although Skandera has years of experience working with educational consulting agencies, she has never worked in a classroom--or a public school. She has never stood in front of a class to teach any subject, and she has never served as an administrator for a school, which severely limits her practical understanding.

This past year, Skandera proposed New Mexico to transition to a new grading system for schools and standards for teacher evaluations, topics that have many educators perplexed by the vagaries and lack of efficacy. If we require our administrators to have at least three years' experience in the classroom as a teacher, why wouldn't we want the same for our secretary of education? Leadership 101 from my military days taught me that the best leaders are those who know what it's like to be in the trenches.

What's most concerning to me is Skandera's relationship with private consulting firms, at least one of which dabbles in private school educational management. I cannot help but wonder if her conflict of interest overrode her self-proclaimed concern to "do what's best for the students" when she decided to tell private charter schools that she personally endorsed their receiving public funds, effectively negating the opposing ruling given by the PED, which had already ruled against private charter schools being publicly funded.

Organizing and running our public schools under "best-practices business models" does not work. It will never work, because it is not a money-making business. It's not a production-based factory, and students are not products. Here's hoping our Senate Rules Committee stands firm for ethics.