On Wednesday, May 7, the Greater Albuquerque Chamber of Commerce hosted its annual Education Matters Luncheon for about 330 attendees at the Embassy Suites.
The keynote speaker was Dr. Carey Wright, current Maryland superintendent of schools and former superintendent of schools for Mississippi. She is the architect of the “Mississippi Miracle” school turnaround. Dr. Wright spent her formative years growing up in Clovis, New Mexico!
Improving educational outcomes in New Mexico has been one of the main priorities of the Chamber, which has worked for years to help move the needle. The Chamber invited Dr. Wright to share her success story in Mississippi with education, political and business leaders in our city and state. NewMexicoKidsCan! and Excellent Schools New Mexico joined the Chamber in sponsoring the luncheon.
Dr. Gabriella Durán Blakey, APS superintendent, introduced Dr. Wright to the enthusiastic audience and complimented her on her fantastic leadership in Mississippi.
Wright took the podium and launched into her 60-minute speech and Q&A session by first letting the audience know this: “People often refer to my work as the ‘Mississippi Miracle,’ but I like to refer to it as the ‘Mississippi Marathon.’ It’s not something that happens overnight,” she said. “It’s something that happens over time. There’s a love of stick-to-itiveness that’s involved with doing that.”
Wright set the stage by reminding our crowd that when she started her education reform work, Mississippi was ranked 50th in education and had been for decades.
She said this is not the case today because over the past decade, the rankings on the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) increased dramatically, as Mississippi’s fourth-grade NAEP scores have jumped from ranking 48th and 50th in the nation in reading and math in 2011 to ranking ninth in reading and 16th in math in 2024.
“So, we ask ourselves this question …how did that happen?” Wright said. Here’s the Mississippi story…
“In November of 2013 there was a culture of low expectations. I actually believe that there were people that didn’t believe that the children in Mississippi could accomplish what they eventually accomplished,” Wright said.
Wright continued saying that in Mississippi, the nine state board members are appointed for nine-year terms — five of those are given to the governor, two to the lieutenant governor and two to the speaker. This board is in charge of hiring a superintendent.
“What (my team) did was work with the legislature very, very closely, and the state board started looking at what kind of laws and policies did we need to have in place in order to drive education to improve teaching and learning,” Wright continued “My entire career has been in education. I am a firm believer that all children, and I do mean all, can and will do what you tell them. There’s not a child that that cannot happen for.”
Wright said Mississippi developed a strategic plan, invested money for the first time into quality early childhood programs and developed an education tax credit.
“When the first year came, I was kind of curious as to how this was going to go. And I think we had collected maybe $350,000. It was a start, and all the money went to those local early quality childhood programs,” she said. “By the time I left in 2022, we were bringing in more than $6 million into early quality childhood programs around the state. The success that we were seeing has grown significantly in Mississippi; we started with 11 collaboratives with about 1,700 students, but by 2023-20424 Mississippi served close to 7,200 public pre-K students with $30.5 million in state funds in quality programs.”
Wright said longitudinal studies have shown children that start with high-quality early childhood education will read on grade level by the end of grade three, will graduate on time, will get and land a job.
“Most will go to college, fewer incidents of drugs and fewer instances of being involved with the police. That starts in pre-K,” Wright said. “So, we took the $3 million and we said we’re going to put them in the areas of the state that are the most underserved and the areas of the state that had the lowest performance coming out of their districts. The other thing that the legislature built in was a tax credit. Any local businessperson or any local individual, if they wanted to give money to their local early childhood program. They got a one-to-one match on a tax credit.”
Wright said Mississippi also passed the literacy-based Promotion Act — which was a game changer. It was the first time Mississippi had ever put focus on literacy, and the program was modeled after a Florida program. The program started with $9 million, and Wright said it wasn’t enough. The second year, the program was funded with $15 million.
“The first thing that we did was we hired high quality literacy coaches. This is very unusual for a state department to do,” she said. “If I’m hiring somebody to work hip-to-hip with a teacher, I’ve got to be sure that they know what they’re doing. I’ve got to be sure that they know the science of reading. I’ve got to be sure that they know what adult learning theory looks like. Because you can take an outstanding teacher, and they may not make a good coach. They may be wonderful with children, but not so much in coaching adults. And when you’ve got a coach that’s standing right beside a teacher, giving that teacher feedback, modeling lessons, doing things to develop plans for an entire school, I wanted the best of the best, so we put teachers through a very robust interview process who wanted to come and coach for us. We had 85 teachers apply and we selected 35 of them and built the coaching staff from there.”
At one point while in Mississippi, Wright had a superintendent ask how they would teach poor kids, as Mississippi has one of the highest rates of generational poverty.
“I’ll tell you how you do it. You take control over what you’ve got control over,” she said. “What do you have control over? You’ve got control over the school day. You don’t have control over what happens to them before they get to you. You don’t have control over them when they leave and go home. But you’ve got control over the school day, so you’ve got to make that day the best day ever, every single day for every single child, because, as I said, as a principal to my staff, when today is over, you can’t get it back, and neither can they. It’s got to be at the top of your game each and every day.”
Wright and her team developed new statewide assessments that also mirrored the rigor of NAEP.
The moves improved data quality and transparency as she wanted the data in the hands of teachers and leaders as quickly as possible.
“It takes time to do this, and I need that to be very clear, there is no silver bullet to improving education in any state in the nation,” Wright said. “It is hard work. It is focus. It is coherence. It is consistency. And it is an unrelenting belief in children and the teachers and leaders that are responsible for them, and that has to be done every single day.”
Wright said a resolution was passed in Maryland around the science of reading, a reform the Chamber successfully championed into law this past legislative session. Wright also said that parental notification when a student is behind in reading is critically important. (The Chamber and others tried to get a bill passed last session to accomplish this reform, but it failed. We will try again next year.)
“We have now created and started to implement a very strong pre-K through grade three policy, and this is we are now working on an adolescent policy,” she said. “We do have a retention piece, but it is not like Mississippi’s at all. We are requiring schools to say this: We’re recommending your child be retained. But if a parent chooses not to do that, they have to guarantee us that they will then be providing either through summer school or some other way stronger, stronger ways to keep their kids moving along. We’ve also implemented a very strong pre-K through grade 12 math policy.”
Dr. Wright wrapped up her speech and took questions from the audience for about 10 minutes.
Wright was asked how her team tracked the implementation and successes of the comprehensive training. She said she had a videographer that she would send out to videotape and talk to teachers, students and principals about what was going well.
“We also monitored our data, because our statewide assessment was also aligned to what we were expecting teachers to know and be able to do,” she said. “We also took a look at those beginning of year, middle of year and end of year assessments, because all that data got fed up to the state. So, we were able to see very clearly which districts needed more help than others, and then I could then deploy my team.”
Wright shared some strategies that were effective.
“I really felt that we needed to start lifting up where it was working well. Because you’ve got to recognize that this work is hard,” she said. “So, it wasn’t just the ‘A’ districts that we celebrated. We also recognize those that improved. It was communicating the best and brightest things that were happening. And then I created a spot in the state board meeting called Spotlight. This was a good opportunity to educate your board on what we’re doing, but educate the public on what we’re doing, and then show the public where it’s really, really working. So, communication became a huge strategy of mine to really start lifting up things.”
Wright talked about how she was able to balance the high standards required to reform along with parent and teacher feedback.
“I remember when I first sent a coach to one of our lowest performing schools, and the principal called me and said, ‘I don’t need this coach.’ And my comment was, ‘Have you looked at your data?’ We were only sending our coaches to the lowest performing schools,” she said. “There wasn’t an option about that, because this wasn’t about him. This was about his teachers and the children. And so once the coach got in the door, and the word started spreading around the power of these coaches. We brought those coaches in once a month and trained them. If you were showing progress, then that was lifted up. And that, to me, was what was most important, not how much progress necessarily, because when you’re at the bottom, it takes that incremental change.”
Dr. Wright wrapped up her comments and offered to help us in our endeavors in education reform.
GACC Chairman Del Esparza thanked Dr. Wright for a meaningful and inspiring speech about the Mississippi successes.
To listen to Dr. Wright’s speech, click here.
The Chamber’s next luncheon will be June 17 with Albuquerque Mayor Tim Keller. Join us!
