Mimi Stewart is a state senator from New Mexico and previously worked as a public school elementary special education teacher for thirty years, with an expertise in reading literacy. Her unique background has turned into a passion for and a history of championing educational policies as a legislator. This episode focuses on how state government and state legislation can work to improve literacy instruction. She takes us through the process of creating a piece of literacy legislation, New Mexico Senate Bill 398, which passed in 2019. Sen. Stewart also shares the latest on that bill and also talks about what she’s now focusing on from her place in the legislature—like changing that way we teach teachers from a university level.
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“Think about how many young kids in school right now we are not reaching and that have that feeling that they're dumb and they can't get it. I had one kid say to me, Ms. Stewart, I think there's just a secret code. And I said to him, You are right. There is a secret code. It's called the alphabetic code, and you can learn that easily.”
– Mimi Stewart, New Mexico State Senator, representing New Mexico’s District 17
Mimi Stewart is a state senator from New Mexico and previously worked as a public school elementary special education teacher for thirty years, with an expertise in reading literacy. Her unique background has turned into a passion for and a history of championing educational policies as a legislator. This episode focuses on how state government and state legislation can work to improve literacy instruction. She takes us through the process of creating a piece of literacy legislation, New Mexico Senate Bill 398, which passed in 2019. Sen. Stewart also shares the latest on that bill and also talks about what she’s now focusing on from her place in the legislature—like changing that way we teach teachers from a university level.
Additional Resources:
Quote:
“Think about how many young kids in school right now we are not reaching and that have that feeling that they're dumb and they can't get it. I had one kid say to me, Ms. Stewart, I think there's just a secret code. And I said to him, You are right. There is a secret code. It's called the alphabetic code, and you can learn that easily.”
– Mimi Stewart, New Mexico State Senator, representing New Mexico’s District 17
This is Susan Lambert and welcome to Science of Reading: The Podcast. It's not every day on the podcast that we feature a sitting state senator. I'm really excited to bring you this conversation with New Mexico's Mimi Stewart . We really wanted to have Senator Stewart on the show for the sixth season because she has spent decades working inside state government to push for better literacy instruction.
Mimi Stewart:Thank you so much , Mr. President, members of the Senate. This, I believe, is a real important issue with young kids that aren't learning to read. I think we can...
Susan Lambert :And on this episode, Senator Stewart takes us through the entire process of drafting, passing, and enacting literacy legislation.
Mimi Stewart:So, Mr. President , I move that Senate Bill 398, thrice amended, do now pass...
Susan Lambert :Which she and the state of New Mexico accomplished in 2019.
Speaker 1:By a vote of 33 in the affirmative, zero in the negative, Senate Bill 398 as three times amended has passed the Senate. Senator Stewart...
Susan Lambert :Listeners will come away from this conversation with a better understanding of the role state government and state legislation can play in promoting research-based literacy instruction. Here's my conversation with Senator Mimi Stewart . Senator Mimi Stewart , thank you so much for joining us on today's episode.
Mimi Stewart:Well, and thank you for having me. This is my favorite topic, the Science of Reading.
Susan Lambert :We're so excited about that. Since this is Science of Reading: The Podcast , just for our listeners, will you just tell us a little bit about what you do before we dive into your background and how you got interested in early literacy?
Mimi Stewart:Sure. So in New Mexico we have what's called a citizen legislature. We are not paid. We get a per diem when we meet in committees. So I've been doing this work for 28 years. I served first 20 years in the House of Representatives and then for the last eight years I've been in the Senate and now I'm actually the president pro tem of the Senate, elected by my colleagues. So when I was in the House, I also was still teaching by trade. I'm a public school teacher , mostly elementary special education. And my expertise is in teaching reading. So I did that for 30 years, including, at the end of it, I also taught teachers how to teach reading according to the science ,for about five years. So I've been working on this issue, as I say, most of my adult life.
Susan Lambert :It's really interesting that you sort of have this dual role for a long time as both in the trenches as an educator and then working to put forward some legislation. So let's go all the way back though, and what drew you into education initially? Why was it important that you became an educator?
Mimi Stewart:Well , that really goes back!
Susan Lambert :<laugh>
Mimi Stewart:You know, I started working in day care. I really liked the interaction with the kids and I was good at it. So then I actually went back to college, got my Master's in education. But then I moved from Boston where I got my schooling and came back to the Southwest where I was raised, and started working in the public schools. And then 15 years into my working mostly elementary special education, I ran for office. I had been working with the Albuquerque Teachers Federation and had been doing some lobbying. And I was frankly appalled that nobody I talked to understood education, understood our fantastic formula that we have. We have a state equalization guarantee. It's really the best in the country. They didn't understand it. And so I decided that, well, I'll just run for office myself. I did so and lost the first time, then won the second time. So I had a dual role from 1995 until 2010, when I retired, as both a legislator and a teacher.
Susan Lambert :Wow.
Mimi Stewart:That was difficult.
Susan Lambert :<laugh> I was just gonna say, how did you manage all that? Being a teacher is difficult in and of itself. And so is being a legislator.
Mimi Stewart:It was hard. It was hard. I did get a retired teacher to take over my classrooms. She was a great teacher and we would spend an entire weekend before every legislative session preparing her. And I finally then retired from the job that paid me, teaching, in 2010, but continued as a legislator. It's been very useful as a legislator to understand the school system at a very deep level. And having spent my entire career in it, it's been very helpful in the legislature and I am thought of as an expert in education.
Susan Lambert :Yeah. As well you should be. And for those teachers that are listening, this should give them some just good confidence in what's happening in legislature because somebody like you is there, really advocating for them and for the students.
Mimi Stewart:That's right. They can see one of their own up here. And I, you know, frankly, when people say, you know, "Why did you run for office?" It was education. And when people say, "Why are you still there?" It's still education. It takes that much work to get things going in New Mexico.
Susan Lambert :Yeah. And we're gonna talk a little bit more about that, but I do appreciate you taking the time to do this, because I know you continue to be very busy both in the state of New Mexico and nationally as well.
Mimi Stewart:Yes. I reached out to some national groups because I felt like there wasn't enough progressive ideas in New Mexico. I was really glad to serve on the International Education Study group through the National Conference of State Legislatures. And they put out an incredible report called No Time to Lose. So then I brought that study group idea back to New Mexico and for two years did an interim education committee all about the NCSL report, No Time to Lose. We studied 10 other countries, a province in Canada, two provinces in China that were doing so much better than the United States on this international PISA Program for International Student Assessment, that looks at 15-year-olds and looks at their math and science and reading; can they put math, science, and reading together and solve real problems? It's an incredible exam and hundreds of countries take it all over the world. And we are kind of right in the middle and we haven't looked up. And the question is always why. And it really does come down to we have great research on how to improve education and other countries use our research to improve and we don't. We have known for five decades how to teach reading according to the science of how kids learn. And certainly other countries are now using our research, but we, we're not. It continues to languish all over the country.
Susan Lambert :And that's really what's motivated you over the course of the years to actually work on this legislation. I'd love for you to talk just a little bit about an important bill that passed in 2019 in New Mexico. And I think it was around screening for first graders, maybe in structured literacy?
Mimi Stewart:So this was Senate Bill 398. I was the sponsor of it. It was put together by a group of people that have been working on how to teach reading in New Mexico for many years, including the May Center. And it was just such a wonderful bill. Before we even offered it, we worked out with our public education department the best way to say it so that it would work for them. It essentially requires that all first graders will be screened with a very simple dyslexia screener. It's no cost to anyone. It takes just a few minutes to administer. And it shows you whether or not young children are looking like they have a tendency towards dyslexia. It's anywhere from eight to 15% of our population no matter where you go. It's just a different brain mechanism. I've stopped thinking of it as a disability. It's a different brain. So we required all first graders to be screened for dyslexia, but then we are requiring first-grade teachers to be trained in structured literacy. Structured literacy is now our term for how you implement the Science of Reading. And for kids with dyslexia, they basically can't learn to read unless you use this approach. But for the 70% of the kids in New Mexico that aren't proficient, it would really help them. Research has shown that kids from poverty and second-language learner students learn with structured literacy better than almost anyone else, because their brain wants an organization for English. So the bill passed, then I had a huge group of people try to get the governor to veto it .
Susan Lambert :Oh no!
Mimi Stewart:<laugh> And I had a huge group of other people organized, with SWIDA, the Southwest International Dyslexia Association. Twice as many teachers asked the governor to sign it. So she signed it. And immediately I started with a work group with the public education department because they were all new. You know, we had just gotten our new governor and they were all new. And so we worked for several years and I'm just so glad to tell you that now we are on track to train all elementary teachers, K through five, with LETRS, the Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling. And we've done K and one and two and now we're starting on three and four and five. And then we'll pick up those teachers that haven't gotten it. So the word back is, "This is the best professional development I've ever had! I wish I had known this when I started teaching kids!" And the second thing is, "Why weren't we taught this in college?"
Susan Lambert :Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. We hear that all over the country, don't we?
Mimi Stewart:Yes.
Susan Lambert :But congratulations to that bill in 2019 and the progress you've made even since then. But I know it wasn't an easy process, and I think when we talked in the pre-call, we were talking about years before that you were working on this legislation and really how long it took to get there. Can you talk a little bit about that early process? 'Cause it's fascinating.
Mimi Stewart:I sure can. You know , I was teaching at See Elementary in the '90s, when the research around this was just starting to come out. And the American Federation of Teachers has a great magazine. It's called The American Educator. And I was getting that.
Susan Lambert :Yeah, that's a great one. Recommended to all of our listeners.
Mimi Stewart:Oh yes. Incredible. In 1997, they put out "The Unique Power of Reading and How to Unleash It." And in the table of contents you hear from Joseph Toon , an incredible educator from Florida, about catching kids early, intervention. You hear from Marilyn Shaker Adams about that elusive phoneme, and how important and how fun those early games are for young kids to understand the sounds of the language. Louisa Motes, who is the expert in how you teach decoding and phonics. So it's, again, fun—not drill and kill. Isabel Beck, with getting at the meaning. So it really laid out those five components.
Susan Lambert :So can you just say again what year that was published?
Mimi Stewart:This was 1998 .
Susan Lambert :1998 .
Mimi Stewart:I got this at home. I stayed up almost all night reading it. I was wrecked the next day. But I was so excited. I was so excited, because it was like, OK, this should transform my teaching! And I went to school talking to others, I just thought it would happen more quickly <laugh> than it has <laugh> . What an understatement.
Susan Lambert :<laugh> For sure.
Mimi Stewart:So I mean, I spent from the '90s really until now trying to promote these changes in how we teach reading and the importance of it. In 2010, I actually passed a memorial that required us to look at our colleges to see how they were teaching it. The National Council on Teacher Quality was grading colleges of education in all the states. And New Mexico got a big fat F for every one of our six colleges. They looked at the syllabi. Well, all those names that I just mentioned that were part of the research; none of those were on their syllabi. It was the old Whole Language. It was the old Balanced Literacy: "Just guess at the words. Look at the picture. Guess at the words ." And so we actually sent teacher-researchers into these schools and colleges to look at how they were teaching reading. And they made a big report to the legislature in 2010 saying, "We're failing our teachers. We're failing to train them thoroughly and correctly and adequately to teach reading." But that was 2010. It's still taken until this time for us to actually take this more seriously and to start doing that professional development that teachers need. So it's just, it's been my entire <laugh> adult career to try to work on this. You know, when we did send a Bill 398, after every committee, you would see everyone in the room crying, because we had our little experts and they were all the kids that had gone to school and felt left behind. And they each wrote out their little statement and they read it to us.
Child 1:Thank you, Mr. Chairman and committee members for your time. When I was at elementary school...
Child 2:I have , yeah , I had a really hard time through first, second and third grade. People called me dumb. Kids bullied me because they saw I was stupid and I wasn't as good as them.
Child 3:So I would go home every night and I would read. But when I would go home, I would start reading and I would feel like I didn't know how to read. So if this bill passed earlier when I was in first and second grade, I think I could have read better today. Thank you.
Mimi Stewart:And it just brought tears to your eyes to think about how many young kids in school right now we are not reaching and that have that feeling that they're dumb and they can't get it. I had one kid say to me, "Ms. Stewart , I think there's just a secret code." And I said to him, "You are right <laugh> . There is a secret code. It's called the alphabetic code. And you can learn that really easily!" <Laugh> So it was pretty emotional and very significant, those students who came to the legislature and told their stories. And this bill passed almost unanimously.
Susan Lambert :Wow.
Mimi Stewart:In both the Senate and the House.
Susan Lambert :Congratulations. So, just to back up a little bit and maybe pull the curtain a little so that we understand the orchestration of all this, you mentioned you worked with the May Center, you mentioned with the Department of Education.... How does one orchestrate all of this to get this topic so that the committee could actually listen and it had that kind of impact?
Mimi Stewart:Well, I must tell you that, you know , I'm in my 28th year. So I was in my 26th year when I got this passed.
Susan Lambert :<laugh> Yeah .
Mimi Stewart:It takes experience and it takes the ability to just continue pushing when you think you've lost. So it took getting people that helped me. I had an analyst, Carmen Gonzalez, who helped with the May Center and went to the PED. It took meetings and it took pushing on people. You know, it just really took saying "It's time to do this. We can do this. This is the right thing to do." And trying to get the Public Education Department to buy in and help us write the bill so that the governor wouldn't veto it. It really took the May Center. Now the May Center is a school for kids with reading issues. It's primarily dyslexic. So they get it. They get it thoroughly. And it took working with SWIDA, that's the Southwest International Dyslexia Association. So it took people who really understand the Science of Reading and who care very deeply about kids to all get behind this. You know, we had no lobbyists. I didn't have any lobbyists helping me or didn't have any money behind it. Only had a teacher that had come to this understanding and knowledge about reading to be able to insert themselves in these work groups. The little work group with the Public Education Department was very significant because they did not understand what we were talking about. It was a steep curve for them. And we just kept at it. We met twice a month for almost an entire year, working out how to do this professional development, how to get a good screener, how to train people on the screener, how to train each district to promote this. Now, we're not done. And there's still a lot of work to do. Because I think unless we start hearing superintendents and principals and other teachers who stand up and say, "This is what we're doing. We are learning to use the Science of Reading. We are making every effort to train every teacher. This is the right thing to do." Instead of the—I mean, it's embarrassing to think about educators, you know, arguing over phonics versus whole language. That's just embarrassing. It's just such an old issue. You need both! An interesting and exciting classroom with good books that you read to your young kids that you then talk about comprehending and understanding that book. You need to teach them the skills to decode. We have got to teach the skills to decode with the decodeable text to support. Unless we do that, we're not gonna reach the 70% of the kids, at least in New Mexico, who are not proficient. It's a crisis. To me, it's a crisis in equity. It's an equity issue, 'cause these are kids from poverty, second-language learners, that are mostly falling through the cracks. And I'm bound and determined to make that not happen anymore in New Mexico.
Susan Lambert :Well, you've talked a little bit about like, so now, you've got folks that are being trained. And 2019, it's now 2022. What's next for you? What are you doing to continue? Because it sounds like you're doing a lot of work helping translate that legislation to implementation. So as you've been doing that work, what are you thinking about next?
Mimi Stewart:We really need to have experts in New Mexico that will continue this, because we have these great people from the LETRS , language central teaching, reading the science in teaching us now. We have them coming into our state to doing this professional development. We need to have our own coaches, our own reading interventionists, our own specialists. We really need people at the Public Education Department who have thoroughly understood and embraced this, have done the LETRS training themselves. I'm trying to get our administrators to do the administrative LETRS training. We're trying to get our early childhood educators to do the early childhood LETRS training. We're just trying to spread this thoroughly, at every elementary level. As I said before, I think unless we can start getting local leaders to stand up and take notice, then it's gonna be harder. The superintendent of the Albuquerque Public Schools , I was very thrilled when he basically said that the screener was really helping in the Albuquerque public schools by identifying kids that would need more work right now. So I'm starting to hear it. I'm starting to hear it from teachers. But it needs to be more widespread and more accepted and more and more understanding. Deep, deep understanding, so that we don't go back to shrugging our shoulders and just trying anything we feel like, which is kind of what the colleges say: "Well just have a quiver and pull out an arrow!" Or you know, "Have some spaghetti; throw it against the wall!" I mean, there is so not a direction from them. And that of course is the next step. Bringing in those deans of the Colleges of Education. And we have been working with them, but they don't seem to change their ways very easily. It's easier to get the schools to change their ways than it is to get those Colleges of Education to change their ways. We are setting up some model schools.
Susan Lambert :Oh, that's great!
Mimi Stewart:And that is really exciting. And we're giving them a lot more support so that they can really try to transform their teaching practices. We have six of them identified. And we're gonna start, our little education committees gonna start visiting them , so that we see what they're doing. So for me it's just an "all hands on deck," and really trying to get people to understand what we mean when we talk about the Science of Reading.
Susan Lambert :Mm-hmm. You know, it's really interesting. I'm thinking as you're talking right now about all the layers of the system that really need to be in alignment with each other to really support the kids in the classroom. So it doesn't take just policy or it doesn't just take teachers knowing the Science of Reading. There's all kinds of things in between.
Mimi Stewart:That is exactly right. And one of the big ones is curriculum. I mean, there is some credible curriculums that have been designed for teachers to understand how to teach this. But unless we say to districts, "You've got a lot to choose from; please choose this; <laugh> this is what you need...." That's why you need the Public Education Department, because they're the drivers of a lot of the curriculum, et cetera . So working with them to ensure that all those layers are aligned is a lot of work. I have been able to get recurring money into our state budget for the education department to focus on this. And recurring money going to every school district. But it is multilayered, and unless, as I said before, we have a cadre of coaches and reading interventionists, we're not gonna continue to work as well as we are in these model schools.
Susan Lambert :I have one question about these model schools. We didn't unpack that a little bit, but I'd love to. What is your—is this the first year that the model schools have been established?
Mimi Stewart:Yes, absolutely. So we have a private funder that works with the May Center , who—we would really like to have a literacy institute that he would help establish. The problem is who controls it . See, I don't want the Public Education Department to control it, 'cause they have too many people that aren't on board with Science of Reading. I don't want the higher ed to control it because they're REALLY not on board . But that's where the model school started, with this idea of a literacy institute. So the Public Education Department has chosen four, and this private entity has chosen two, and the idea is to show and prove how significant it is if you start at kindergarten and that kindergarten teacher knows exactly what part of the alphabetic code is her job. And she taught those ways to teach it, that teach to mastery, then they go to first grade and that teacher knows exactly which part of the alphabetic code on up through third grade. And then to show how you can extend that knowledge , with things like Just Words program, where in third, fourth, and fifth, they're looking at multisyllabic words and they're able to break them down, because they learned about the Greek and Latin root words. So that learning to read is like, "This is what we're in school for! We're all on board, teachers and students." So we wanna see that continuum and we wanna see proof that our methods work. So that's gonna take us a couple of years to get that going. <laugh> I'm really excited about the model schools. And people applied! Schools applied!
Susan Lambert :That's great .
Mimi Stewart:Schools and principals applied to be the model school. I mean, they'll get more research, they'll get more resources, but they had to agree to "This is what we're gonna do." So I just think that's gonna be really exciting in a few years.
Susan Lambert :For sure. We'll loop back and find out how that's going. You know, Senator Stewart, it's amazing, because if somebody jumped into the middle of this podcast and didn't understand who you were, you would think you were a reading specialist or a reading researcher, because you really deeply do know what it takes to get kids to learn how to read. And that's amazing.
Mimi Stewart:Well, I took that on myself over 10 years. Every summer I did work. I studied with Sandra Dylan, with her multi-sensory teaching of basic language skills. I did the LETRS training. I read extensively. I read all those people who I mentioned earlier, Louisa Mots and Isabel Beck and Marilyn Adams. I went to all of their workshops that I could find, in the summer, at my own expense. I look at my library that I've got, it goes back to the '90s. So I spent 10 or 15 years understanding myself how to teach according to the research because it was so important. It's so important. You know, you can't ever say there's a silver bullet, but I do believe that reading is fundamental. It's foundational. And kids who can't read are just—they're just set up to fail. And shame on us if we continue to do that.
Susan Lambert :Yeah. Well, I'm gonna ask you this question, but I think you've, you've almost already answered it <laugh>, but I'm gonna ask you it anyway. You know, we're all about building infrastructure systems to support these students. It's the heart of what we're doing is all about the students. So if I say to you the phrase, "It's all about the students," what does that mean to you in your work?
Mimi Stewart:You know what, what that makes me remember are those precious students from the May Center who told us how horrible their life was, just being in school, before they started to learn to read. So to me, this is a fairness issue. It's an equity issue. It's a social emotional issue. Imagine a child growing up thinking that they're dumb and stupid only because they haven't had a good enough teacher to teach them. So it's an equity issue. To me, it's one of the basic foundations. And you know, we talk about STEM learning and STEAM learning and all of that. And you know, we talk about having, "Oh, let's do a career technical and, and connect with business," and all of that's really important. But the kids that I'm talking about aren't even there in school anymore because they've dropped out because they can't read. The ninth grade dropout is huge. That's when they hit all those multi-syllabic words. Well , even in middle school. And they start being able to just feel horrible about themselves. So it's equity, and it's what we need. And you know, there's several states that have adopted the structured literacy and they're doing much better. This is based on research. We know what we're talking about. And our students are just too important to not learn how to teach them how to read.
Susan Lambert :I agree. That's why I'm doing the work that I'm doing as well. And so, Senator Stewart , we are just so thankful to have you on today to help us understand what it takes to support students. And thanks for all the work that you do for them and being their advocate. We really appreciate you.
Mimi Stewart:Well, thank you. And thank you for letting me know about this podcast, <laugh>, certainly something I'm gonna start listening to! <laugh>
Susan Lambert :We encourage you t o, and we would love your feedback.
Mimi Stewart:All right .
Susan Lambert :Thank you again.
Mimi Stewart:Thank you!
Susan Lambert :Thanks so much for listening to my conversation with New Mexico State Senator Mimi Stewart . Check out the show notes for more on New Mexico Senate Bill 398, and stay in touch with the show by joining our Facebook discussion group, Science of Reading: The Community. Next time on the podcast, we're going to take a look at a different state-level approach to improving literacy instruction.
Speaker 2:Sometimes there's this sort of image that the work you're gonna do is like all high-level strategy and it's so, you know...and I'm like, we were deep in the weeds of procurement issues.
Susan Lambert :Stay tuned for that. And thanks again for listening to Science of Reading: The Podcast.