BY WILLIAM MELHADO w i l l i a m @ s f r e p o r t e r. c o m
J
EMEZ PUEBLO—A game of duck, duck, goose; colorful, laminated pictures; songs, dances and a zero-English policy—this is what it looks like to protect an unwritten language, distinct from its neighboring tongues, only spoken by a few thousand people in the world. On a recent morning at the Walatowa Head Start Language Immersion Program, the youngest speakers of Towa sit on a carpet promoting global friendship, fidgeting and looking around at the heavily postered classroom. Teacher Jacqueline Magdalena asks one of the younger-looking boys, in Towa, which clan his family claims. He’s nervous and shies away from different images, representing family clans, tacked to the wall. When the question finally clicks, the boy points to the image of an eagle and slips into a practiced series of movements that Magdalena later explains is known as the eagle dance.
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MARCH 2-8, 2022
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SFREPORTER.COM
“He’s got moves,” Magdalena says later, laughing as she lifts the ban on English for SFR after the children have gone home. While the room’s soothing background music and yellow, red and blue construction-paper birds hanging from the ceiling suggest a certain lightness, there’s serious work being done here. “We continue our fight because we don’t want to lose our language,” says Lana Garcia, the early childhood program manager at Walatowa. The fight for linguistic and cultural preservation predates statehood, given the assimilatory nature of Western education taught in New Mexico’s public schools. The struggle has been ongoing and, despite a massive victory through acknowledgment in a seminal court case, it continues through to today, an SFR analysis of fairness in the state’s education system finds. In 2014 families, teachers and schools from across New Mexico banded together to bring attention to the dismal state of public education, suing the state for violating their students’ constitutional rights to a sufficient and adequate education. A court order and a pandemic later, the state’s education landscape for Indigenous students, English-language learners and others who have been systemically held back for generations looks different than it did eight years ago, but not entirely for the better. Initiatives designed to increase equity and billions of federal and state dollars have flowed into schools, much of it directed at the “at-risk” students identified by a 2018 judge’s ruling in the Martinez and Yazzie v. State of New Mexico lawsuit. In the courtroom, at least, state officials including the two most recent governors ap-
pear to believe they’ve done enough, spending millions more in legal costs to end the case. Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham’s administration, including her education leadership team, acknowledge in public statements and in interviews, however, that there’s still room for improvement. That fact became increasingly apparent during the past two years, as the pandemic forced a shift to remote learning—prompting the plaintiffs in the Yazzie/Martinez case, as it’s known, to seek an emergency influx of technology upgrades to keep students on track. Even beyond that, the state has not kept up with some of its own benchmarks for compliance, SFR’s analysis finds. Education advocates say more money alone won’t erase the inequalities. Rather, a
fundamental transformation of the schooling system is still needed. New Mexico’s education failures, including the nation’s lowest test scores, were apparent long before Louise Martinez and Wilhelmina Yazzie and other families found their way to the Santa Fe courtroom of state District Court Judge Sarah Singleton, who formally retired in the middle of their case, but stayed on in a limited capacity to see it through. For students identified as at-risk in the lawsuit, Singleton ruled that their educational outputs—standardized test scores, graduation rates, college remediation and more—were insufficient to pursue a career or post-secondary education.
ADRIA MALCOLM
New Mexico faces a steep climb to make education more equitable
Students, left to right, Teagan Toledo and Leianna Lucero dance as Koah Baca drums in the Hemish classroom for the language immersion program at the Walatowa Head Start in Jemez Pueblo.
