Friday, March 8, 2019

The 2019  Legislative Session in New Mexico:  Three Comments

We will leave Chihuahua alone with its grief for a few days.  Our dynamic, potentially important partner to the South is still reeling from violence, hoping a National Guard might stem the tide, and praying the exploding drug addiction among young people can be reversed.  But before leaving, one thought:

Isn't it time state government began spending some energy devising a foreign policy toward Chihuahua?  That is to say, a coherent, public, border policy of mutual benefit to both sides that consists of more than Wall trash-talk?  Imagine Beto as Governor of Texas.  Whatever else you think of him, as governor he would change the national conversation from the border as evil to the border as opportunity.  Shouldn't New Mexico step into this imaginary space as well?  How about some new ideas for the border?  NAFTA was a long long time ago.  Is New Mexico capable of regional leadership?  I was hopeful with Big Bill, but, most will agree, he just made things worse on the border, among other reasons by sticking his nose in Chihuahua politics way back in 2003.  I was hoping to help Susana with border issues when I became a member of her cabinet, but I was frozen out from the very beginning and the border, for her, was simply a photo op.  Is it time, now, to give this another try?

Three Comments on the NM Legislature:

First the good news:  There is energy in the crop of newly-elected legislators.  After eight years of deliberate non-governance, followed by eight years of expensive smoke-and-mirroring from a president-wannabe, followed by eight years of sullen, petulant, ineptness, the state is languishing at the bottom of the barrel in just about everything citizens want from government.  The election of new faces--any faces--in New Mexico is an indicator of a public desperation not often captured by pollsters, whose major interests lie in handicapping the horse race, not in improving the downs experience for the average Joe. The earnestness and lack of cynicism, so far, from the new crop is good news.

The bad news is that earnestness is not enough, and the adults in the room, that is to say, the Senate, with members in both parties, needs to find a way in the waning days to encourage the enthusiasm--and the forces behind them--while firmly steering the ship away from the shoals when the children, mischievous or innocent, head that way.  This is not a new role for the Senate; indeed, it seems to function best in this parental posture.

Second:  major proposed legislation this year seems to offer symbolic gratification, feel-good stuff, not sound governance.  Adding $400 million (17%) to public education sounds like a serious investment for a state ranking 50.  But Richardson already threw money at schools 15 years ago and the achievement scores of students--the real problem of education in New Mexico--did not go up and the rankings went down from 47  to 48 or 49. Salaries were tied to improved credentials of teachers, but improved credentials did not improve student scores.  The new legislation. likewise, has nothing in it to suggest a serious accounting to the public for this huge expenditure.  Many states spending much less per pupil than we do rank much higher.  Arizona and Utah are good examples, right next door.

New cabinet agency for early childhood?  Sounds good, but administratively expensive, and likely to further fragment an already highly fragmented, dysfunctional, system. What kind of workforce will New Mexico need 20-40 years from now?  What are our educational institutions doing to get us there?  What goals for improving student achievement might we realistically be able to meet in the next ten years?  Cut the ethnic achievement gaps in half?  Catch up to the national average scores in math and reading?  Triple the number of college graduates in STEM degrees?  These questions, being asked in many states, aren't even on the table in New Mexico.  But until we wrestle with them we will lurch from fad to fad, with little to show for it.  This year it was early childhood.  Decades ago it was "bilingual" education. Twenty years ago it was charter schools.   There is no bilingual education in New Mexico today.  We don't even encourage bilingualism, in spite of a constitutional mandate to do so.  And after many years of experience, charter schools, as a whole, perform no better than public schools.  New Mexico has sunk to 50 out of 50 in education and we have no plan or timetable to get us back to 48, much less a mediocre 25. Current proposals amount to an expensive wish and a prayer, requiring no serious effort on anybody's part

Third, what appears to have captured the public imagination so far this year in politics is not the move to give teachers a raise, not the early childhood education commotion, not the fixing of the Susana-led wreckage of mental health delivery systems in New Mexico.  It is the proposal to make it harder for some people, presumably those with risky profiles, to buy a gun.  This is the issue that will be remembered.  Mora, the bluest of blue counties, is just the latest in a rash of counties drawing a line in the sand, and expect some of the leaders who jumped into the sanctuary issue to be running in primaries a year from right now.  Perhaps even more important, this drives a deep wedge between Hispanic citizens everywhere and the Democratic Party, just as the abortion issue alienated hundreds of thousands of Hispanics who resented the imposition of national Democratic themes into local New Mexico mores.  Bringing Washington issues to New Mexico seldom pays off.  Hispanics were open to Johnson in 1994; they were open to Susana in 2010.  What has the Democratic Party done for them lately?

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