RGF opinion piece: Child poverty didn’t improve from 50th to 17th
The following appeared in the Santa Fe New Mexican on December 21, 2024.
A few weeks after the recent election, New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham went on MSNBC’s Morning Joe and said, “New Mexico’s went from 50th to 17th on child poverty [in the nation].” This is simply untrue.
The governor is conflating the U.S. Census Bureau’s traditional poverty measure, in which we remain 50th, and its supplemental measure. That includes several federal and state government programs on which New Mexico performs better. To be completely clear, these are very different measures. Conflating them is simply not accurate. The governor should stop.
A supplemental measure factors in government benefits, including free meals for public school students and tax credits. Do those measures mean people are less poor? Yes, New Mexico’s “supplemental” poverty measure (never as low as the traditional measure) has improved slightly relative to other states in recent years. But have there been a big improvement in outcomes for New Mexico children in the last five to 10 years? I’d argue that if anything, New Mexico children are doing worse than ever.
Specifically, the Annie E. Casey “Kids Count” Index again put New Mexico’s children at 50th in the nation this year. Notably, that report uses the “traditional,” not the “supplemental,” poverty number to calculate child poverty in New Mexico and other states.
And then there is education. Several years ago, powerful “progressive” Senate Pro Tempore Mimi Stewart commented that “New Mexico doesn’t know how to teach poor students.” But by the “supplemental” index, New Mexico’s children aren’t poor at all. Instead, they are 17th best off in the nation. Sadly, that recalculation hasn’t helped New Mexico’s education outcomes, which saw our students come in dead last in all four categories in the National Assessment of Educational Progress in 2023.
More recent data has not shown significant improvement in student achievement in New Mexico. Of course, simply recalculating data doesn’t improve real-world conditions.
What we do know is that the supplemental measure serves the governor’s political interests. She wants to be seen as successfully improving conditions for children and believes government programs such as free school lunches help reduce poverty.
I believe New Mexico children have suffered greatly under her administration, and now it seems as though she is using sneaky data tricks to fool people into thinking things are getting better for our kids when they aren’t.
The reality is that the Children, Youth and Families Department is a failure. Our schools are worse off than ever. Crime is out of control, and while the state is flush with cash from oil and gas, the benefits of this boom have not been felt by average New Mexicans. According to data from the University of New Mexico, the state’s age 0-24 population is expected to decline by 20% by 2040.
We hope the Legislature has some robust debates about the status of New Mexico children (and how to improve it) in the upcoming 60-day session, but the discussion needs to be based on accurate and realistic data, not conflated and confused data.
Paul Gessing is president of New Mexico’s Rio Grande Foundation, an independent, tax-exempt research and educational organization.
