Michael L. Hays
If behavior is the true measure of belief, then public education does not matter in New Mexico. Year in, year out, about 50 percent the New Mexico state budget goes to public education, but elected state representatives and senators devote only about 5 percent of their attention to it. Public officials are indifferent to public education because far too many members of the populace are also indifferent to it.
A few relatively good public school systems prove the point. Los Alamos and Rio Rancho have better-than-average school districts because their communities include a highly educated population that has not tolerated lower-than-average schools for their children.
Such few exceptions aside, evidence of pervasive indifference is persistent toleration of inferior pubic education at all levels. New Mexicans tolerate the state’s reputation for worse-than-mediocre performance in public education. They tolerate low national rankings of New Mexico’s two largest state universities. They tolerate long-term, flat-lined, below-average student performance: 50 percent proficiency scores in reading and arithmetic in 4th and 8th grades, and high dropout and low graduation rates.
They do not notice, much less protest, the absence of public criticism or media investigation of the public schools, the public universities and state education agencies.
Spending on education, but not for education
The obvious question is why New Mexicans tolerate a high level of expenditure on public education for a low level of educational performance. The answer makes perfect sense under the circumstances of an impoverished state: The expenditure of public taxes on public education serves, and is meant to serve, the purposes not of education, but of employment and social services.
Institutions of public education, like institutions of government, are major employers in this state, with its third-world economy of agricultural and mineral extraction, land and housing development, and tourism. No one needs much education in a poor state with few opportunities and many people accustomed to, if not content with, being poor, ill-housed, ill-fed and unhealthy.
Moreover, institutions of public education keep children, adolescents and young adults off the streets while older adults try to make a living at the no-skill or low-skills jobs, which their youngsters will take once they drop out or graduate, if they do not go onto welfare or into crime. So it seems fitting that, when the state had to consolidate functions in the New Mexico Budget Division, it grouped agencies responsible for public education with agencies responsible for prisoner incarceration and rehabilitation.
Over time, public education has become an instrument of politics and politicking. The Legislature has abdicated responsibility for everything but budgets for education, with the usual portions of pork so that representatives and senators can claim to bring home the bacon.
The real power for defining policy and determining programs in public education resides with the governor. His appointees, the secretary of education and secretary of higher education, are obedient to his bidding, which has sometimes served the interests of political advantage more than those of public education.
This tacit consensus that education serves to employ teachers and staff, and confine and control students, confounds efforts to make education the primary means to improve the lives and livings of New Mexicans. Worse, such efforts inevitably raise issues that New Mexicans prefer to treat like sleeping dogs by letting them lie.
Quality or equality?
The crucial issue is whether education should focus on quality or equality. An education of quality does not come cheap and easy, and it invariably differentiates among students because of their different backgrounds and circumstances, commitments and motives, and intellectual and artistic abilities. An education of equality aims to obliterate such differences and invariably works to the disadvantage of the more talented without working to the advantage of anyone else.
An important subsidiary issue is whether education, at least in English and history, is about competence in the form of cultural and civic information and skills or about reinforcing ethnic identity and inculcating ethnic tolerance.
In New Mexico, equality and ethnicity are winning. The latest triumph of ethnic politics is the creation of a Hispanic Affairs Department, the bureaucratic relative of the Indian Affairs Department. In education, the latest triumph of parochial ethnicity is the dilution of the English and American literature curriculums by excluding most early writers who, of course, were mostly white and male.
Just as “black pride” of the 70s had no lasting educational value, so “Hispanic pride” of the 10s will have none. Advocates have not explained what good comes from distorting subjects important to understanding an evolving and increasingly inclusive American culture and American democracy, and thereby leveling and Balkanizing education.
If all students of all ethnic backgrounds continue to receive an inadequate education, they will continue to suffer equally in their lives and livelihoods. Looking back, they will not appreciate a public education that enforced an equality of adverse effects and emphasized ethnic identity which, under economic and political stress, strained ethnic tolerance.
What best serves New Mexicans
Given limited resources, responsible New Mexicans and any legislators who come to accept the responsibilities implied by the size of the public education budget will have to consider what best serves the interests of New Mexico and New Mexicans.
• First, they will have to lead by becoming educators of the electorate. They will have to define the basic purposes and policies of public education, to include a transforming role in the state’s economy.
• Second, they must take a role – hopefully, an informed one – in approving and monitoring state-level core curriculums, and any testing regimes based on them.
• Third, they will have to establish the means to improve, in part by integrating, diverse and independent educational departments, agencies, and institutions. They must combine the departments of higher education and public education or require them to conform and coordinate their policies and programs, recast their responsibilities, and be more responsive to the Legislature.
• Fourth, they must require colleges of education to train teachers to teach the content of subjects as defined by public school curriculums, with emphasis on English.
• Fifth, they must include in the budget process an accounting from officials in state education departments and state institutions of higher education that their efforts in education serve the state on the basis of something more rigorous than enrollment or graduation rates, or “satisfaction surveys” of “clients” or “customers.”
Then, maybe, New Mexico will offer a worthy public education about which its citizens can care and in which they can take pride.
Michael L. Hays (Ph.D., English) is a retired consultant in defense, energy and environment; former high school and college teacher; and continuing civic activist. His bi-monthly Saturday column appears in the Las Cruces Sun-News; his bi-monthly blog, First Impressions &Second Thoughts, appears on the intervening Saturdays at firstimpressionssecondthoughts.blogspot.com.