Students, educators, business leaders and policy makers convened Tuesday at Santa Fe Community College for Teach Plus New Mexico’s Economic Mobility Summit. The event at SFCC was the second stop in a four-part series that kicked off in Hobbs in August. The speakers and panels throughout the day shared a common goal—to strengthen college and career readiness systems across the state.
“When you look at the state's benchmarks, we're consistently ranked at the bottom and we want to get those statistics up,” Raul Alvarado said. “We want to help other students have a brighter future, and also incentivize other students to go to college and do great things.”
Alvarado is a junior at Capital High who was part of a Student Voices panel at the summit. He is a Simon Scholar and the coordinator for his school’s supercomputing club and plans to pursue a master’s degree in electrical engineering after high school. Alvarado will be a first-generation college student and said the work of Teach Plus New Mexico is vital for the success of students like him.
Teach Plus was founded in 2007 and the New Mexico branch followed in 2016. Since then, the nonprofit has helped teachers identify and address the biggest issues facing students and advocated for policy changes through its Statewide Policy Fellowship. Teach Plus has also worked with the New Mexico Public Education Department to improve teacher training and fill vacant teaching jobs across the state. Teach Plus New Mexico Executive Director Hope Morales said it is easy to identify the major issues in New Mexico education but much harder to find solutions.
“We work with great teachers and conduct training sessions with them,” Morales said. “We help them do their own research and connect that with their classroom experiences.”
Morales said those strategies help Teach Plus New Mexico develop actionable recommendations to improve education and work toward economic mobility for students. Although Tuesday’s Economic Mobility Summit largely focused on college and career readiness, Teach Plus helps students of all ages.
“Much of the work that I have done related to really young students has been with literacy,” said Alisa Cooper de Uribe, who moderated the Student Voices panel. “And Teach Plus has done a lot of work to foment best practices from the teacher preparation level to supporting teachers in the classroom.”
Cooper de Uribe is a first-grade language immersion teacher at New Mexico International School in Albuquerque. In 2021 she was New Mexico Teacher of the Year and was Teach Plus New Mexico’s Fellow of the Year in 2022. She said Teach Plus supports her work by promoting “science based and evidence-based ways to teach kids to read.”
Cooper de Uribe said hearing older students’ stories during the Student Voices panel was eye-opening. She said the students on the panel are grateful for the opportunities New Mexico offers but also understand what the state needs to improve.
“The students mentioned some of those specifics,” Cooper de Uribe said. “From financial all the way to just knowing that there are people who have their backs and can connect them with opportunities to help them build their skills.”
Morales agreed that the student panel was one of the most impactful sessions of the day. She said that organizations can sometimes focus too much on data and numbers. At the Economic Mobility Summit, she got to hear the stories behind the numbers. Many of the students who spoke during the summit will be first-generation high school graduates and first-generation college students.
“Learning more about their journey and what helped them get to that place--those are the types of systems that we want to learn about,” Morales said.
One education-related issue hitting New Mexico is the so-called “brain drain” or out-migration of highly educated workers. A 2023 report from the Federal Joint Economic Committee found that New Mexico lost nearly 11,000 prime age workers between 2010 and 2020. More than half of them were college educated.
But Morales is optimistic that that tide is turning. She said New Mexico has both the career and education opportunities to retain the state’s brightest students and workers, noting that Teach Plus New Mexico also provides scholarships for students who pursue higher education in state.
“In addition to that, we have lots of high wage, high need careers throughout the state,” Morales said. “So, people are able to stay in their own communities.”
Alvarado, for his part, wants to stay in his home state and is eyeing New Mexico Tech. He also said the state’s National Laboratories could provide him with a sustainable career.
Alvarado and Morales both said improving economic mobility in New Mexico is not something that one organization or one sector can achieve alone. Morales was pleased with the turnout at the summit and the feedback she received from attendees. But she knows that Teach Plus New Mexico’s work is much bigger than one event.
“This isn’t about a moment,” Morales said. “We are here to create a movement.”
