Michael L. Hays
New Mexico is the Land of Enchantment, but it is also a third-world society, with a third-world economy and education. Although it has enclaves better in those respects in, among others, Los Alamos, Santa Fe, Rio Rancho and Albuquerque – all northern-tier locales – on the whole, it is a poor state. It ranks fifth in per-capita assistance from the federal government. It relies on extractive industries – mining, ranching and farming – and tourism, which are not engines to grow a robust economy for all citizens.
Were it not for federal facilities like the Los Alamos and Sandia National Laboratories, White Sands Missile Range, and, north of El Paso, Fort Bliss and Biggs Army Air Field, New Mexico would be even more impoverished and probably lack any magnets for private-sector industry, like those in the Albuquerque metropolitan area. Whether the spaceport attracts associated high-tech industries downstate remains to be seen.
One obstacle to economic improvement is New Mexico’s poor public education system. A state whose public schools have long ranked near the bottom according to national measures of educational performance and whose two largest state universities have long held third- and fourth-tier rankings has difficulty attracting bright, young, high-tech entrepreneurs with families. Limited resources, socio-cultural factors, and politics have impeded, if not precluded, reforms to improve the state’s education system.
Challenges posed by these endemic conditions are enormous and will not get easier as the federal government ends its stimulus funding to the state. Belt-tightening rarely promotes cooperation instead of competition, and ideological warfare will not help. Worse, in New Mexico, the challenges – indeed, the requirements – are not prompting political leadership equal to them.
As I consider the two gubernatorial candidates, I am appalled. When all is said and done about New Mexico’s miseries, I have to question whether they can provide even minimally adequate leadership for the next four years.
Both are lying
The only topic which gubernatorial candidates Diane Denish and Susana Martinez have thus far debated by itself is education. Both have declared their commitment to education by declaring that, if elected, they will not cut one cent from public education. Because both know what at least politicians, academics, thinks tankers, and journalists know, namely, that the end of stimulus money will create a prospective deficit of many hundreds of millions, both are lying. Both know that, if elected, they will have to make some of the cuts necessary to balance the state budget from the education budget.
But neither can transcend election politics to tell the electorate the truth. Perhaps they know that they cannot make presumably attractive promises without pretending that money will exist to pay for them. Perhaps they believe that a poor and poorly educated populace is especially prone to reject bad news, beat the messenger, and vote for their challenger. Or, per tradition, telling truth is just not done.
Even so, Denish and Martinez should be doing better than promising to support programs or approaches that spend money with little regard to commensurate benefit. Both have adopted positions serving up educational proposals that reflect their parties’ philosophies and platforms, squander scarce resources on unproductive or unproven programs or approaches, but fail to improve, much less reform, education. Thus, their positions amount to waste and fraud, if not also abuse.
They should be offering ideas which demonstrate respect for taxpayers’ monies, ensure best value for any investment, and take into account all educational, institutional and financial implications. Neither is doing anything of the sort.
Flawed education plans
Denish wants to invest money in early childhood education, a long-advocated idea of hers with visceral appeal. The essential problem is that Head Start-like programs have shown no lasting educational benefits – which makes them a waste of resources. A second problem is funding. Without new, sustainable and dedicated funding sources, funds must come from other parts of the education budget, with the same adverse effects as vouchers for private schools or funds for charter schools (see below).
A third problem is that such a program continues to waste resources because it develops an entrenched constituency which makes it virtually impossible to eliminate the program and its personnel, and thereby perpetuates both unnecessary employment and expense, without educational benefit.
In typical Democratic fashion, good intentions and high hopes transform themselves into enduring workfare programs serving the purpose of jobs, not education. This initiative is not the change for which we have been waiting.
Martinez offers nothing better, and maybe something worse, in wanting to fund vouchers for non-public schools or increase funding of charter schools. In the case of vouchers, the state would get no benefit in return for spending public funds on families who already can afford to pay private-school tuition – a giveaway waste of state funds if there ever was one. Funds for vouchers or charter schools may not change the size of the education budget but would reduce funds available to the public schools. With their fixed facility costs, they would have to cut staff and thereby ensure larger classes, fewer courses, increased teacher workload, and poorer education.
Moreover, since the records of academic performance in both types of schools are comparable, no increased benefit in education justifies investing in vouchers or charter schools and disinvesting in public schools. Only anti-public-sector, pro-private-sector politics motivates the proposal. It purports to give students the chance to leave “failing” schools and promises to get them a better education elsewhere.
In typical Republican fashion, Martinez has shown no concern for the remaining students and has made no commitment to fix what she claims is broken. Perhaps she wants public schools “failing” to fuel support for her positions.
In short, neither Denish nor Martinez offers New Mexico hope of upgrading the quality of public education, which is the critical path to economic improvement. Their proposals for education offer nothing but politically prescribed nostrums to no good effect. Whether they know anything about education – I think that they do not – they are certainly not putting forth proposals to deal with the looming cuts in state revenues, the inevitable cuts in public education, and the urgent necessity of doing better across the board with less.
So, for all their talk of helping the economy, also by politically prescribed nostrums to no good effect, both are prescribing educational aspirins and Band Aids for the persistent economic pain the state continues to experience.
Lacking credibility to clean up corruption
The one topic which both candidates have shared by means of mutual accusations and recriminations is corruption. If I assume the worst, there appears to be more than enough to go around, and it comes around. Both women appear to have touched pitch and defiled themselves.
Their assurances that, if elected, they will clean up corruption will lack credibility until they come clean, confess their sins, and detail how they will reform themselves and redress past lapses as they reform government. Their earnest declarations to eliminate waste, fraud and abuse are so clichéd and so contrary to their campaign promises on education that they constitute, in this sordid and depressing campaign, its few moments of comic relief.
Buyer’s remorse is coming
Once we have finished congratulating ourselves for having finally elected a female governor – white if Denish, Hispanic if Martinez – and celebrating this historic first, we shall find ourselves hung over with a case of buyer’s remorse. That remorse has nothing to do with gender, which has nothing to do with their positions. Nevertheless, neither is demonstrating an understanding of the most important long-term problem facing the state or making proposals which can improve the state’s ability to provide a good public education and thereby help build a strong economy.
Neither is suggesting ways to spend education dollars prudently. Neither is showing independence of partisan dogma in order to deal with poor public education or other present, not to mention prospective, problems. Neither is displaying the intellectual creativity or moral and political courage to lead the state forward.
As for the rest of us, we need to think about what to want in leaders, not merely elected officeholders, and how to identify, develop and elect them so that they can guide the state in the 21st century.
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.