State-mandated testing program helps track progress but sparks concerns over inconsistent data and student frustration
By Natalie Robbins / Albuquerque Journal Staff Writer
April 26, 2026
Lilly Garcia is learning to read. Her tutor is a robot.
On a Friday morning in her combination second- and third-grade class at Matheson Park Elementary School, Garcia reads a story about a rabbit and a fox traveling to a tropical island. She’s wearing a headset linked to a laptop running a program called Amira, an artificial intelligence-based learning software.
Amira works by listening to students read a sentence out loud and catching their mistakes. If a student mispronounces a word, a video of a human mouth appears on screen, repeating its correct pronunciation — “opposite,” “replied,” “admired” — and the student replicates it into the microphone for points.
A bespectacled cartoon girl with purple hair — this is Amira — sometimes pops in to ask students a question about the text: “What does the author mean by, ‘The wind is angry today?’”
Beginning this school year, the state of New Mexico is requiring all students in kindergarten through second grade at public schools and public charter schools to take reading assessments on Amira. Its use is approved up to grade eight. The program grades students’ progress in a numbered score used to measure school and district performance.
The New Mexico Public Education Department began using Amira after the software provider that schools had been using for testing, Istation, was acquired by the San Francisco-based company Amira Learning.
Amira is required for assessments in two states — New Mexico and Idaho — and is authorized for state use in Oklahoma, Georgia, California, Texas, Michigan and Massachusetts.
Some schools, like Matheson Park, a small elementary school in Northeast Albuquerque, have warmed to Amira. Teachers use it to monitor reading level progress at the beginning of each month, said Principal Jacqueline Lovato.
Matheson Park is an Amira success story — since the beginning of the year, reading scores in Lilly Garcia’s class are up nearly 30%, according to Amira data provided to the Journal.
“I haven’t heard any complaints from my teachers,” Lovato said. “I think the kids have gotten more comfortable.”
The PED recommends 30 minutes of Amira tutoring per week for students in need of reading intervention, according to department officials.
While official data from Amira and state agencies like the PED report the program grades with the same level of accuracy as human scorers, teachers told the Journal there are discrepancies between Amira’s scores and a student’s actual abilities.
Some teachers and staff at Albuquerque Public Schools say the program is inaccurate and cumbersome. Reported problems typically fall into two categories: speech and dialect variability and environmental and technical interference.
Amira sometimes does not recognize voices of students with speech disabilities or foreign accents, teachers said. These students still must use the program for assessments.
And in busy classrooms, teachers say the AI picks up background noise and voices of other students, leading to inaccurate results.
In Celeste Hernandez’s kindergarten class at Bel-Air Elementary School in Northeast Albuquerque, Amira can be finicky and challenging, she said.
Hernandez has seven students on individualized education programs, or IEPs, for speech — meaning they have a disability accommodation — and eight who are learning English.
When used by these students, Amira has trouble recognizing their words, she said.
“It’s not always great at picking up the language of students, especially when they have trouble with (spoken) language,” Hernandez said.
Some students with speech disabilities are difficult to understand, even for teachers, Hernandez said, and the program will make them repeat words again and again until they’re exasperated.
“They’re doing the best they can,” she said. “But I mean, there’s a point of frustration where it’s like, why are we doing this? You can just see it in kids — they just are defeated.”
As is true in most cases, before there were computers for conducting reading assessments, there were humans. Hernandez remembers when teachers would sit down with kids one-on-one to gauge their reading progress.
“Did it take a long time? Absolutely,” she said. “But I could tell you where every kid was all the time.”
In Ryan Hayes’ special education classroom at Chaparral Elementary School on Albuquerque’s West Side, about half of his students are adept at using Amira, he said. For these students, the program can provide a good representation of their abilities. For the rest, using Amira is difficult.
“The problem with any online platform in any setting — you’re going to have some students that are successful with it. You have some students that are not successful with it,” he said.
Some of his students have trouble processing directions. Hayes said he sometimes has to repeat instructions to them five to eight times. When Amira asks these students to read a sentence only once or twice, they’re not able to understand, he said.
“If you have a kid with social communication deficits, like the type of kiddos we work with in here — with receptive, expressive and articulation delays — I feel like there should be an opt-out,” he said.
Amira does have disability accommodations — the program has modifications for one of Hayes’ students who can’t speak, but the student’s short attention span means she frequently needs to be redirected to the test.
“When you have her do it a couple of times, she escalates and starts screaming and shouting,” Hayes said. “It dysregulates everybody in the classroom. They’re more focused on that behavior, and then their scores also plummet a little.”
Having to battle students once a week takes up precious instructional time, Hayes said.
“Tuesday’s actually our Amira day. Today, I’ll bring them in and they will start groaning. I have a couple of kids — they’ll start crying because they have to do it today,” he said.
Teachers are able to look at the data after assessments are complete, though sometimes, school staff say they find inconsistencies.
“I would say there are inaccurate scores more often than not,” Hernandez said.
Erik Johns is a teaching and learning coach at APS whose job it is to track and interpret student assessment data. The data Johns sees from Amira, he said, is often inconsistent.
“I’m seeing in the data these massive fluctuations month to month in children,” Johns said. “Statistically, when you’re looking at percentile rankings, if you see a kid fluctuate one to two points, that’s normal. Fluctuating 20 or 30 points every month is totally abnormal. And it’s primarily because the AI is not working correctly.”
Inaccurate data provides an inconsistent look into student progress, Johns said, which means it’s difficult to know how to help students who are struggling.
Teachers, too, are being judged on data that may not be an accurate assessment of their students, he said.
“I have some really, really excellent teachers here, especially in my lower grade levels, and they’re being judged on this data that’s completely inaccurate,” Johns said. “It’s not factual, and it’s heartbreaking, because they’re working very, very hard to do the very best by our students.”
Since the program is a new state requirement, an adjustment period is expected, PED spokesperson Janelle Garcia said.
“The PED has been working with Amira to provide ongoing training and to support students who speak other languages or who have disabilities impacting speech,” she said. “In addition, a range of protections are built into the program to ensure that Amira’s mastery evaluations are not impacted by accent or unusual speech pattern.”
The department acknowledges that the program is not suitable for students with the most significant cognitive disabilities.
“PED defers to students’ IEP teams to determine the most appropriate assessment approach for these students,” Garcia said.
At APS, 31,267 students have read 2.5 million minutes on Amira so far in the 2025-26 school year, according to Chris Blevins, Amira’s senior vice president of strategic partnerships and government relations.
Despite the kinks, APS maintains that Amira is making an impact.
“We know there are issues with the program that the company is working to fix, but Amira is making a positive difference for students by providing personalized practice to strengthen early literacy skills,” APS spokesperson Martin Salazar said in a statement. “It’s an intervention resource that supports — not replaces — the instruction our teachers provide, helping them identify and address specific student needs.”
Based on the company’s findings, Amira officials say it has proved its worth: Students who use Amira 30 minutes per week report an additional eight weeks of reading growth with the program compared to students who didn’t use it, Blevins said.
Blevins asserts that the data from Amira is accurate. There are no major differences between the scores on this year’s assessment and the one conducted last year using a different program, he said.
For students with special needs, the program can be adaptable, he added. His own daughter has an IEP and uses Amira to read, he said.
“Amira is a safe place for her to read and to learn, and Amira is a helper for her,” Blevins said.
Blevins said he understands the panic about AI but hopes people have an open mind.
“AI reminds me of cellphones,” Blevins said. “Twenty years ago, when Steve Jobs brought out the iPhone, people were afraid of a device that was in their hands, and now everybody in the world seems to have a cellphone. I think this is just an evolution of technology.”
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