Your NM Gov Podcast Ep. 2: Critical Race Theory goes New Mexican

Today we’ll take our first dive into education in this legislative session – and it’s a doozy. But we don’t shy away from controversy on YNMG; we dig into it. School boards around the country have been among the new cultural battlegrounds where parents with differing political views fight for their respective moral values. Sometimes it gets ugly. In New Mexico we’ve been talking about updating social studies standards for about a year. It’s been about 20 years since the Public Education Department weighed in on that. Along with new ideas of trying to respect more perspectives in school curriculum has come the backlash over the perception of critical race theory sneaking in and harming our kids.

Today, we have Searchlight New Mexico’s education reporter, Alicia Inez Guzmán. She recently published an article that touches on inequities in instruction – the longstanding challenge of implementing a fair and sufficient public education for all New Mexican kids as outlined in the Yazzie-Martinez lawsuit – as well as gender equity, and critical race theory, or CRT. All these ideas are getting tied up together, and now a statewide ban on CRT has been proposed to lawmakers in House Bill 91.

You can reach us at YNMG@kunm.org.

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This segment is part of our Your New Mexico Government project, a collaboration between KUNM radio and New Mexico PBS. Support for public media provided by the Thornburg Foundation.