The College & Career-Ready Policy Institute is raising standards for New Mexican high school students to prepare them for higher education.
The institute is supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and will benefit eight states, including New Mexico, that pledged to raise education standards.
"We think that this is something that will not only increase the number of students graduating but also the number of students taking college courses," said Bill Flores, deputy secretary of the New Mexico Higher Education Department.
Flores said the higher standards will emphasize Advanced Placement and dual-credit courses and require high school students to take four years of math. He said the program's goal is to make high school more rigorous.
"The state of New Mexico has raised all those standards, and now we're working with high schools and four-year institutions to implement that law," Flores said.
Flores said a number of curriculum standards are being added to the New Mexico high school credit criteria.
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"We're just sort of phasing in the new requirements so that students will have time to prepare," Flores said.
He said Advanced Placement courses and dual high school and college courses are also going to be made available to students in rural areas through an e-learning Web site called IDEAL-NM, at Ideal-nm.org.
IDEAL-NM, which stands for Innovative Digital Education and Learning, is an online educational portal that offers high school, college and vocational courses.
Tim Snyder, executive director of IDEAL-NM, said students can take some vocational courses through the Web site and that dual enrollment courses will be available by January.
"IDEAL-NM is the state's portal to e-learning services on a P-20 lifetime basis," Snyder said. "P-20" refers to the levels of education, from pre-school to graduate school, that IDEAL-NM is working to provide.
"It's an extraordinary resource, and we have yet to see its full potential," he said.
Flores said the state Higher Education Department wants to make college courses accessible to high school students because those classes provide engaging curricula while preparing students for a college course load.
"Many students were essentially blowing off the senior year," Flores said.
He said this mind-set is too common among graduating high school students who have fulfilled the majority of their credit requirements.
And that attitude is most dangerous in math and science, Flores said.
"The problem is that mathematics is sort of like a foreign language," he said. "It's something that you have to work on a lot and continuously, and if you stop using it, you forget it."
Freshman Benjamin Lande, who is majoring in computer engineering, said college-level courses weren't available at his high school and that the IDEAL-NM plan would have been helpful.
He said the most challenging classes were honors courses but that these didn't provide the opportunity to test out of introductory college classes.
"Some honors classes weren't comparable to AP classes," Lande said. "I think I would have taken AP classes if they were available."
Flores said the Higher Education Department wants students to succeed as freshmen and attend college and that the integration of college-level courses in high school would provide incentives for students to go farther.
"Our goal is that every student graduates in New Mexico and that they graduate college- or career-ready," he said.
