New Mexico's Race-Based Education Plan vs. Last-Place Results

New Mexico just unveiled a new road map to improve outcomes for Black students. On its face, it sounds like progress. But step back and look at the whole board, and a harder question comes into focus: how does the worst-ranked education system in America, failing every group of children it serves, answer that crisis with a targeted, race-based program for less than two percent of its students? This isn't a story about $200,000. It's a story about leadership, priorities, and a grift that keeps losing generations of New Mexico kids.

The Floor We Keep Standing On

Let's be honest about where we stand. In the 2026 Kids Count Data Book, New Mexico ranked 50th in the nation for education — dead last — for the ninth consecutive report.¹ We nudged up to 49th overall in child well-being, snapping a four-year streak at the very bottom, but stayed 50th in education and 50th in family and community.²

The underlying numbers should stop you cold. Roughly 80 percent of our fourth graders are not proficient in reading. About 86 percent of our eighth graders are not proficient in math.¹ These aren't children who can't learn. These are children we have failed to teach.

And we have not failed them on a shoestring. Since the 2018 Yazzie/Martinez ruling, the state has poured more than a billion dollars into what one lawmaker called "half-measures," and we still rank 50th.³ Hold that fact. We'll come back to it.

What the "Road Map" Actually Is

The new guide isn't a spontaneous idea. It's the implementation arm of the Black Education Act — House Bill 43 — signed into law in 2021 and tied directly to the same Yazzie/Martinez court order.⁴ The law mandates a defined set of pillars: culturally relevant curriculum, anti-racism training for educators, professional development, a mechanism for racial discrimination complaints, and family engagement.⁵

The startup cost was a one-time $200,000 general-fund appropriation for fiscal years 2022 and 2023.⁶ That number is small, and frankly, it's a distraction. Arguing over $200,000 misses the real machinery this law built — machinery that doesn't show up as a clean line item and never gets re-voted on.

The Permanent Infrastructure Nobody Re-Authorizes

Here is what the law actually created and what quietly persists year after year:

A permanent Black Education Act Bureau housed inside the Public Education Department, with named, salaried staff including a manager and dedicated curriculum and professional-learning coordinators.⁵
A standing 23-member Black Education Act Advisory Council, appointed by the Secretary, carrying ongoing per diem and mileage costs.⁷
A statewide compliance mandate touching all 89 districts.⁴

That's the point most coverage misses. The dollar figure was a down payment. What the law embedded is permanent headcount and a perpetual statewide obligation — costs that are diffuse, recurring, and never set before voters or parents for renewal.

The Mandates Most Parents Have Never Heard Of

If you're a New Mexico parent, you almost certainly were never sent a notice about any of this. Yet these are statewide requirements, not opt-in programs:

Annual anti-racism and anti-bias training is required for every K-12 and charter school educator in the state — delivered through a six-module online series — regardless of whether a given school enrolls a single Black student.⁴
A library of race-specific lesson modules is published through the state's learning platform for classroom adoption, covering topics from the Buffalo Soldiers to the Black Panthers.⁵
Districts have received policy directives down to the level of dress code, including guidance to drop bans on head coverings as racially discriminatory.⁵

Reasonable people can debate the merit of any one of these. But they were imposed top-down, statewide, and largely without the knowledge or consent of the families whose children sit in those classrooms.

The Federal Collision Course

There's a live legal cloud over all of this. In January 2025, President Trump issued executive orders directing the termination of DEI programs, and in February the U.S. Department of Education sent every federally funded school a "Dear Colleague" memo invoking Title VI of the Civil Rights Act — giving schools until late April to end race-based programming or risk losing federal dollars.⁸ ⁹

That memo reached New Mexico directly. The University of New Mexico was told it risked losing federal funding if it didn't end race-based programs.⁸ A federal judge largely blocked the orders in February 2025, so today there is no enforceable finding that programs like the Black Education Act break the law.¹⁰

But understand the structural exposure. The Black Education Act is, by design, a race-targeted state program with mandatory anti-racism training — the exact profile the federal memo flagged under Title VI.⁸ The state is proceeding anyway, while the legal question sits unresolved. The honest framing isn't "the feds came for the Black Education Act." It's that New Mexico has built permanent, race-targeted education infrastructure squarely in the crosshairs of federal civil-rights enforcement, and chosen to keep building.

This Was Never a Money Problem

Here's where the argument gets airtight, because we don't have to guess. We have other states that prove the point.

If race-conscious mandates and ever-rising budgets were the path to results, the states that embraced both should be soaring. They aren't. Consider two deep-blue states that, like New Mexico, adopted equity mandates in 2021 and spent like the answer was always more money:

Washington was a clearly above-average education state, ranked around 20th in the nation. In 2021 it mandated equity and anti-racism training for all public-school staff through SB 5044.¹¹ Since then, Washington has slid — to 26th, then 27th, and down to 31st in the 2026 rankings.¹² Its own former governor admitted a 32 percent spending increase "didn't move results," and fourth-grade math proficiency fell from 10th in the nation to 27th between 2013 and 2024.¹³ ¹⁴

Oregon spends roughly $17,374 per pupil — the 21st-highest in the country — yet ranks 42nd on national test scores and 35th in return on investment.¹⁵ Per-pupil spending climbed 80 percent since 2013, while reading and math proficiency declined.¹⁶ Oregon even added nearly 13,800 employees as enrollment fell by some 29,000 students, and a state analysis acknowledged graduation requirements were lowered "in the name of equity."¹⁶ Today it ranks 43rd in education.¹⁷

These are the bookends. New Mexico at 50th, never moving. Washington sliding from the top tier. Oregon spending a fortune to land near the bottom. Three states, the same era, the same approach — and the same flat or falling results.

The Lesson We Refuse to Learn

So here is the lesson, and it's the one the data actually proves: New Mexico does not have a resource problem. We have a leadership problem and a teaching problem.

We want to be precise, because precision is what makes this undeniable. The point is not that equity programming caused the decline — that's a causal claim the numbers won't carry, and we won't overreach. The point is what leadership chose to do with its energy, its dollars, and its attention. Faced with children who couldn't read, our leaders reached for ideology, bureaucracy, and new mandates — while the core job of teaching reading and math went unmet. When results stayed flat, the answer was always the same: more money, more staff, more programs. Never accountability.

And we'll say plainly what too many won't. Educating a child based on the color of their skin, rather than the capacity of their mind, is chasing a nothing-burger. A child's skin cells can't balance a checkbook — their mind can, if we bother to fill it. We are sorting and labeling children by group identity while leaving their minds empty, and then we call the labeling "progress." It isn't progress. It's a grift, and the price is paid in generations of New Mexico kids handed lesser opportunities because we couldn't be bothered to teach them to read.

We love this state. That's exactly why we won't pretend. Our children are not a line in a strategic plan or a demographic in a status report — they are the whole point. They deserve adults who will measure success by whether a third grader can read, not by how many councils we've seated or modules we've mandated.

The grift has to end. Not because any one program is uniquely villainous, but because the entire posture — answering failure with more spending and more ideology — is a documented dead end in three states now. What's right is right. Teach the children. Drop the games. Fill their minds, and the rankings will follow. We've tried it the other way for nine straight years. The kids can't afford a tenth.
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