Mo Charnot
Mariana Padilla shares her vision as the new Public Education Department Secretary and answers questions from the press at the Tuesday afternoon meeting.
As Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham introduced recently-appointed Public Education Department Secretary Mariana Padilla during a Tuesday afternoon press conference, she was full of praise for Padilla’s experience in the classroom and in leadership roles within state government.
“She is very effective at meeting kids where they are and showing them that they can meet every opportunity, that they are worthy of the attention and support that we want and shall give them and that they can do anything they want—that there's nothing they can’t achieve,” Lujan Grisham said. “She's remarkable.”
Lujan Grisham appointed Padilla to the head PED position on Sept. 10, less than two weeks after former secretary Arsenio Romero resigned from the job (a job held since 2023) to pursue the open position of president of New Mexico State University. According to Michael Coleman, Lujan Grisham told Romero to either stay in his secretary position and “keep his eye firmly on the ball at the PED” or resign after he was named a finalist for the NMSU position.
Padilla has been involved with Lujan Grisham’s administration from the start in the realm of children and education, and she has even worked as a classroom teacher. She has served as director of the New Mexico Children’s Cabinet, temporarily fulfilled interim secretary roles at both PED and the Children, Youth and Families Department and, until now, has served as Lujan Grisham’s senior education policy advisor.
According to Lujan Grisham and other state education officials present at the press conference, Padilla’s work as policy advisor has shaped several initiatives to improve education within the state, including the launch of a statewide literacy initiative and establishing the Early Childhood Education and Care Department (ECECD).
Elizabeth Groginskiy, secretary of the ECECD, said the work Padilla has done with her department to expand home visiting programs for families and make pre-K accessible and affordable in New Mexico “has been tremendous.”
“I cannot say enough about her passion, her commitment, her leadership and her actions,” Groginsky said. “We would not have the early childhood education and care department we have today without her steadfast leadership and her partnership with me.”
Padilla said at the conference that she intends to “commit to stay to the end” in her new position. This is despite the position’s high turnover rate. Throughout Lujan Grisham’s administration, the governor has appointed five PED secretaries in the past five years.
“I, like other parents around the state, want our children to feel good about being in school and to be engaged when they're there, to feel that they're successful academically, and to know that if they're struggling, they will get the support they need to be successful,” Padilla said at the conference. “That's why educational leaders need to step up and be courageous to take on the things that we know will make a difference for our kids, and that will lead to better graduation rates, better attendance and better academic achievement for all of our students. My efforts leading the PED will be focused on demonstrating measurable growth in all of these areas.”
When a KOAT-TV reporter began a question asking how Padilla plans to meet New Mexico’s challenges in education (namely being ranked 50th in education nationally) by stating students suffer from the constant change in leadership, Lujan Grisham was quick to disagree, saying “It makes it sound like having a change in cabinet secretary means kids didn't have access in the classroom, and that’s not true.”
Padilla and Lujan Grisham said they both feel that the PED and schools must work collaboratively to be held accountable for student achievement.
“The time now is to focus on a parallel accountability: track one, inside PED and the entire Children's Cabinet, and two, inside the schools themselves,” Lujan Grisham said. “It can't be focused on one or the other.”
Padilla said on the PED’s end, the department needs to focus on ensuring that its core operations to support schools, namely funding and data, are “functioning incredibly well.” In return, she adds, the schools need to utilize the PED’s support—which can range from structured literacy programs to tutoring—to make decisions that have the most impact on students.
“We know the things that work, but we have to have the courage to do it, and we have to be accountable to our students and to our families to make sure that we're taking those things on,” Padilla says. “We also need to make sure that we have highly qualified and effective educators and school leaders. We have just over two years remaining in this administration to accomplish these goals, and we have our plan …we're going to continue that effort with a real sense of urgency.”
Padilla highlighted improvements the state has seen in relation to education in the past few years, which includes rising literacy rates and a 7% improvement in chronic absenteeism in the past school year. She said the PED will be continuing its work in literacy through educator prep programs, interventions for students struggling with reading and summer programs, and added that structured literacy and chronic absenteeism are the two issues she is most prioritizing in this school year.
“We have to really see the things [Lujan Grisham] mentioned—double digit increases,” Padilla said. “It's happening, but we need to get much better about our implementation side of structured literacy, making sure that it's being done in every single classroom and every school,” Padilla said.”
When asked by SFR how the PED plans to address its delayed releases of student test score data– a central component in accounting for student achievement and improvement, Padilla said that “working on our data is a top priority for me, and something that we have been doing since I stepped into that role.”
“It's incredibly important; it's something that we need to step up and do. and hold ourselves accountable at the state level, but make sure that schools and other sort of decision makers have that data when they need it as early as they can possibly get it,” Padilla said.
Last year, the PED’s school-level test score data was not released until November, and district-level data was delayed further into 2024. This year, Padilla told SFR, test score data can be expected “in the coming months,” and that some assessment data will be shared later this week at a Legislative Education Study Committee meeting.
“We are gearing up for our 40th day reporting period, which happens in October, and we're we're in really great shape in making sure that we're working with our school districts and charter schools to make sure that they're trained and prepared and able to get their data submitted on time and accurately, because they also have a role in our data piece,” Padilla said. “It is the department, but it's also very much the role of our school districts and charter schools to submit data timely, and to submit accurate data. We're working on this not just internally, but with our school districts and charter schools.”
Lujan Grisham said schools that don’t “have what they need” to accurately report student achievement need to receive more support from the PED, and that showing earlier assessment data from districts may help New Mexico continue being transparent with its state of education.
“We want the public to know where we are. We want to be transparent. It's a hallmark of this administration,” Lujan Grisham said. “When we don't always meet our own expectations, we should lean in harder.”
Editor's note: This story has been updated to correct Lujan Grisham's name by removing a hyphen previously placed in her surname. SFR regrets the error.
