Albuquerque Public Schools
'Incredible Progress'
Determined effort to visit schools exceeded Interim Guardrail 2.2 – and makes a difference for schools, principals.
One of the great success stories in Albuquerque Public Schools comes in something called Interim Guardrail 2.2.
Occasionally overshadowed by the district’s work on meeting Goals 1 through 4, interim guardrails are vital elements in how APS goes about its transformation efforts at every school. Interim guardrails, in essence, are near-daily plans of attack in the district’s quest to improve student outcomes. They require commitment, dedication and a willingness to adjust old practices.
A case study is Interim Guardrail 2.2.
The interim guardrail says the district’s assistant superintendents will make instructional visits to schools designated as Priority under the APS Performance Framework. Will supervisors just show up, say hello and wave goodbye? Of course not. Rather than grip-and-grins, visits “will provide principals with essential tools, professional learning, coaching and support.”
At every school, that means assistant superintendents observing instruction; modeling instructional leadership; providing targeted feedback and coaching; focusing on high-leverage activities; building relationships; identifying areas for a principal’s growth. All are critical components of both short- and long-term plans to improve.
In May 2024, before the guardrail was instituted, there were no such visits. The goal was to hit 75 in 2025, 100 in 2026 and 150 by May 2027.
But in the first year of implementation, APS assistant superintendents made 225 visits to Priority schools – obliterating the 2027 goal. Overall, schools were visited an incredible 930 times.
“Thank you to the APS administration and the team for this incredible progress,” school board President Danielle Gonzales said during her report at a recent meeting.
District officials note the visit is only part of the story. The discussions coming from those trips are aligned to an evaluatory scorecard called the Principal Leadership Tool that lessens the guesswork in what both supervisors and principals are talking about.
“It’s not a visit just to check a box. It’s a visit with an associated framework aligned to our goals as a district to coach a principal up, in alignment to student outcome data,” said Deputy Superintendent Antonio Gonzales, who oversaw last year’s implementation. “… The variability is minimized or hopefully eliminated, because we’re all having the same conversation based on the same metrics, and that’s the Principal Leadership Tool.”
What does that mean on a day-to-day basis? In some cases, it depends on a school’s challenges and/or a principal’s needs. But getting hands-on coaching, feedback and well-intentioned support is critical for site leaders central to a school’s success.
Case in point: In 2024-25, Cibola High Principal Kim Finke said she and Assistant Superintendent Marco Harris embarked on a project specifically focused on Native American students at the Northwest Side school.
Finke said she was concerned Native students at Cibola did not report feeling a strong sense of belonging or self-efficacy, which are key elements of APS Goal 4. In response, the school set up focus groups for Indigenous students to talk about their experiences. Based on that feedback, Cibola followed up with a focus group of staff members to see what their understanding was of what Native students shared.
Finke said she and Harris helped take the information gleaned from both students and staff and created strategies that would help improve students’ experiences.
“The results were incredible, with big gains for Native American students from the fall to spring … in all areas of the (Panorama) survey,” Finke said. “In most cases, they are now performing above our school average on Panorama. And for the sense of belonging, the gain for this group of students was 9%, which was even more than I could have imagined. It was beautiful to set a goal, work with a thought partner at each step of the process, and see an impact on students. Best of all, I built some new relationships with kids, and Marco was here regularly enough that many students thought he was part of our staff.
“In my mind, this is what supervision from upper-level leadership should be like,” Finke added. “I have been in school administration for 21 years, and this was the best experience I have had with a direct supervisor. It was genuine coaching.”
Wilson Middle School Principal Matthew Burrows said the value of such an intensive approach allows a principal to learn, but also to offer thoughts on how things were going in a safe environment. His partner is Assistant Superintendent Chris Sanchez.
“As a principal, it is easy to be sucked into the day-to-day of the job,” Burrows said. “The coaching helped me stay focused on the goals (long and short); a chance to be heard with the struggles of the job (and sometimes being heard was all that was needed); encouragement to try things out of your comfort goal (Chris always pushed me to celebrate the little successes with my staff, even when I was hyper-focused on what needed to be done next); and helping see things through a different lens or something that I would not have thought of. … Being a principal can be very lonely and people look to you for all the answers; I don't have them all. The coaching process gives you time to get your thoughts out.”
For his part, Harris said the work of assistant superintendents – there are eight spread out among more than 140 schools – helps accentuate a bottom line when it comes to developing principals and improving schools. The assistant superintendents are on the road at least three days a week.
“If I work and build the capacity of the principal, we help build the teacher,” he said. “From there, the teacher can help build the student.”
Deputy Superintendent Gonzales said the process “establishes common expectation and common language” for both principal and supervisors, but also leaves no ambiguity about the overall mission: increasing student outcomes.
“People want to be successful. People want to do well,” he said. “This process, I really believe, is giving specificity to our principal supervisors and our principals, regarding success looks like. … This takes all of this (the many concerns a principal must address) and narrows it to a specific set of values we’re all working on.”