New Mexico could improve the quality of its workforce and strengthen its economy by implementing changes to its adult education programs for workers who have low levels of education and few job skills. Developing a career pathways framework—which weaves together and aligns adult education, workforce training, and college courses—would increase the success rate, employment opportunities, and earning potential of the state’s low-skilled workers. It would have the added advantage of improving the educational success of those workers’ children.

Veronica C. García, Ed.D., executive director of New Mexico Voices for Children, will submit the following statement to Secretary Squier regarding the proposed work requirement change for recipients of SNAP benefits at the hearing on Friday, August 29:

New Mexico moved up from the bottom ranking of 50th in the 2013 national KIDS COUNT rankings to 49th in child well-being in the 2014 KIDS COUNT Data Book, released today by the Annie E. Casey Foundation. While improvement was made from the 2013 to 2014 editions of the report in some child well-being indicators—such as child poverty, high school graduation, and teen birth rates—others declined.

Dr. Art Rolnick, formerly of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, will give the keynote address at the 2014 New Mexico KIDS COUNT Conference, which begins at 8:00am today. More than 300 attendees have registered for the event. Dr. Rolnick, who is Co-Director of the Human Capital Research Collaborative at the University of Minnesota, will make the economic development case for greater public investment in early childhood care and learning services.

Funding levels for New Mexico’s K-12 public school system have still not recovered from budget cuts made during the peak of the recession. The education operating budget was 10 percent lower in the 2013-14 school year than it was before the recession, when adjusted for inflation.

New Mexico has cut higher education expenditures by $4,588 per student since 2008, when adjusted for inflation. Only two states—Louisiana and Hawaii—made deeper cuts. And New Mexico is one of the 48 states still spending less per student on higher education than before the recession.

Changes in the state’s corporate income tax (CIT) structure during the 2013 and 2014 legislative sessions are causing New Mexico’s CIT revenue to erode. This important revenue source helps stabilize the state’s general fund, which has had erratic growth in recent years, according to a report released today.

As national demographics change, white children are expected to be in the minority by 2018. New Mexico is well ahead of the national curve on that measure, with the second-largest share of racial/ethnic minority children in the 50 states (74 percent). The negative effects of centuries of discriminatory policies and practices are still felt by racial and ethnic minorities. For children, these impacts include barriers to opportunity that lead to health disparities, and achievement gaps in educational attainment and later economic well-being.

Almost 215,000 New Mexico children have benefitted every year from improvements made in 2009 to the federal Earned Income Tax Credit and the Child Tax Credit, according to a factsheet released by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

New Mexico Voices for Children has been awarded a three-year $900,000 grant from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation to continue its work to improve the well-being of New Mexico’s children. The grant is for overall operations support.