Bishops correct in concerns about racism
Last year a friend of mine, a retired educator, approached me with an offer. He was curious about the scandalous discrepancy among ethnic groups’ scores on standardized reading and math tests in New Mexico. He proposed to take a look at why this could be happening and then to take his findings to appropriate legislative committees.
What he found during his visits to public elementary schools in Albuquerque helps me understand what New Mexico’s Catholic bishops were getting at when they linked “racism” to the recurring failure of the Legislature to secure additional revenue from the Land Grant Permanent Fund for programs to adequately prepare all of our children for school.
Quoting teachers at several schools, he reported they feel the evaluations are stacked unfairly. “We work with the poorest of the poor but our schools and teachers are graded in comparison to schools where the children come from families where they are read to, where they are taken to museums, work on computers and get good nutrition. Those students are bound to do well on the tests. The whole system is set up for poor children and their teachers to fail.”
His report made clear that the key to erasing the gap between the educational performance of most Anglo children and the performance of most children of color, who now make up significantly more than 50 percent of the students in our public system, is to find ways to better prepare them for school.
Doing this will benefit all students in our system, not just those who receive early childhood services, as teachers will then be able to focus their attention on whatever promotes all the kids’ learning, instead of devoting so much time to bringing the illprepared up to a readiness level.
This is precisely what the bishops’ letter points out: “We have a unique opportunity to change inexcusable inequities in our state. The fact that 90 percent of Native Americans and 83 percent of Hispanics are not proficient in reading at the fourthgrade level should be of the utmost concern for us all.”
So what the bishops and other supporters of increasing the amount of permanent fund interest going to early childhood programs aim for is a leveling of the playing field by ensuring every child is ready to learn on day one, wiping out the structural imbalances that occur now.
And that is why they can see so clearly the unconscious institutionalized racism that opponents espouse when they say: “We want the same thing … we just don’t want to do it right now. We are willing to gradually increase the funding over the next dozen years, but we won’t try an approach that would at a stroke eliminate the penalty poor children of color suffer today.”
The gradualist approach condemns thousands of kids this year, next year and for a decade to come, to entering school unprepared. Sure, a few hundred more each year will get the benefit — assuming the Legislature continues increasing general funding for these programs a little at a time — but thousands of others are going to be sacrificed by that approach, left to lag behind or drop out; left to be unprepared for economic survival in a rapidly changing economy; requiring public expenditures for years to come for their drug use, alcohol addiction or criminal behavior; their children and even grandchildren continuing to serve as a drag on our state instead of the fully realized assets they could be — if we had invested in them this year.
So I strongly support the bishops’ stance: “Structural racism is constructed by policies and practices that intentionally or not, produce the outcomes that place a racial group on an un-level playing field.” There is no reason to become defensive over the term “racism.” If that is what legislative inaction produces, then it is an accurate description.