Splitting early education bill doesn’t help NM kids

Division encourages people to think of education as a list of options when it is not

A funny thing happened at the Roundhouse this year. The constitutional amendment to fund both birth-to-5 and K-12 education programs with increased disbursements from the Land Grant Permanent Fund was divided into two separate bills: one to fund birth-to-5 education and one to fund K-12.

This move reflected, perhaps, the sponsor’s frustration with the Senate’s inability to pass a visionary piece of legislation that ensures our kids get quality education from birth until high school graduation.

By splitting the bill, Sen. Michael Padilla may have thought he could get at least one of the bills to pass. He was wrong.

Once the constitutional amendment was split into two bills, it looked a lot less visionary and more like a desperate scramble for whatever we can win for our resource-starved schools. As badly as we need more for our schools, the Legislature is pretty used to saying “No” to this sort of thing. They’re much more likely to get excited about passing a new tax cut for corporations or the wealthy.

It’s true that the Legislature has said “No” to the constitutional amendment to fund early learning and grade school education plenty of times, too. But we can be confident that they will have to say “Yes” at some point soon.

What was once a radical idea — having a plan to fund education from birth to college — is something that more cities and states are making a top priority.

Our next generation of legislators will see how New Mexico is getting left behind by the states that are making sure everyone can afford an early education — not just the wealthy.

They will see that an early education system that serves only a third of the state’s children, kids who are more likely to be white than Latino or Native American, is racist. Only with the significant investment that the constitutional amendment provides can we make our early education system equitable.

By acknowledging the critical continuum of education that students need for their first 18 years of life, the early ed/K-12 constitutional amendment teaches legislators an important lesson: If we don’t address the needs of these first two stages of learning together, our system of education is compromised.

When two out of three children enter kindergarten without any early education to prepare them for school, we spend tremendous resources trying to help kids catch up.

So when our next legislative session rolls around, we advise our senators not to chop the constitutional amendment into separate bills.

That encourages people to keep thinking about education as a menu of options. It’s not.

All children need high-quality early education and all children need highquality grade school education. Consequently, when we address the needs of both separately, at best, we get half of what we need.

At worst, we get nothing.