The Adinkra symbol sankofa is commonly depicted as a bird walking forward with its head turned backward.
Originating from the Akan people of Ghana, West Africa, the symbol literally translates to the phrase “go back and get it.”
For the New Mexico Public Education Department, it serves as a representation of cultural reverence — one of the tenets of its newly released instructional guide for Black education in the state. All five of those tenets — also including respect, collective responsibility and reciprocity, reconciliation, and restorative wisdom and decision making — correspond with an Adinkra symbol.
It’s a fitting introduction, perhaps, for a guide that emphasizes creating what the department calls a “culturally and linguistically responsive” public education system.
“We seek instruction that students can identify with,” said Public Education Deputy Secretary Yvonne Garcia. “… We have all kinds of learners who come to us from all different cultures, and the more a student can identify with who they are and make a link to what’s being taught, they’re going to learn it.”
Published earlier this month, the 53-page Black Education Instructional Scope 2.0 outlines philosophical and practical approaches for educators teaching Black students. It stems from the Black Education Act — second-in-the-nation legislation signed in 2021 that has sought to improve Black student outcomes, particularly by expanding educator training and instructional materials.
The high school graduation rate for Black students in New Mexico was 76.4% in 2025 — about four percentage points below the total statewide average. Still, the rate for Black students has improved over recent years; in 2024, it was 69.3%.
Developed by Public Education Department officials, educators and students across the state, the Black Education Instructional Scope 2.0 features strategies for teachers — “incorporate storytelling, oral history, and cultural ‘show & tell,’ ” for example — plus external links to cultural and instructional resources.
One of the primary goals is to increase graduation rates for Black students by ensuring they feel valued and seen in their classrooms. But the mere existence of better curriculum is not, in isolation, a solution to the struggles Black students are facing in New Mexico’s public schools, according to Timothy Green IV, an educator working toward his doctorate in educational thought and sociocultural studies.
“You can write all of the best curriculum and have it, but if people don’t know how to integrate it, don’t want to integrate it, it just sits on a shelf, just kind of gathers dust,” said Green, who also serves on the Black Education Act Advisory Council.
New Mexico has a checkered past in terms of its ability to deliver a high-quality public education to all its students. The landmark Yazzie/Martinez lawsuit, first filed in 2014, led to a judge’s ruling that the state had failed to provide a sufficient education system for Native American students, students with disabilities, children from needy families and English learners.
Of more than 315,000 students enrolled in New Mexico public schools, 1.8% are Black, according to the most recent data from the National Center for Education Statistics. While Black students are not specifically listed as one of the four student groups identified in the lawsuit, the state’s most recent Yazzie/Martinez Action Plan, released in November, focuses on equitable access to education, culturally and linguistically responsive educators, support services, effective funding, and data and accountability.
Access to materials
The Black education guide began in July 2024 with initial meetings between the Public Education Department’s Black Education Act Bureau and its Curriculum Instruction Division, followed by public input sessions. The original version of the guide, which took inspiration from the similarly formatted Indigenous Instructional Scope, was published in 2025.
The Public Education Department then assembled a 15-teacher task force to develop the final version. Applications for in-person and virtual professional development related to the guide are set to open in the fall.
“We hope to have this to be an ongoing type of professional development, where instead of it being a one-time practice, we will support our schools long term,” said Black Education Act curriculum specialist Joseph Ulibarri. “Also, providing instructional resources, including some of the reading materials for our teachers, as well as showing them the resources we have for implementing these in a regular lesson plan or unit plan.”
The struggle for educators to access culturally responsive materials has repeatedly come up since the Black Education Act was signed. Teachers don’t always have time to find high-quality materials to implement in their classrooms, Ulibarri said — and when they do, they sometimes end up paying for them out of pocket.
The Public Education Department in November launched an online platform for Open Educational Resources, which provides digital access to core curriculum materials and supplementary resources. The site features a Black history collection, among others.
Gabriela Campos/The New Mexican
Green said he questions whether all curriculum deemed culturally relevant and responsive is actually that. Much of his work, he said, revolves around stopping the school-to-prison pipeline that can come along with suspension and expulsion.
“For me, the answer is no, because how can it be culturally relevant, culturally sustaining and culturally responsive when punishing the Black and brown body, Indigenous body, is normalized through structural violence?” he said. “And we just look the other way and we blame the individuals, we blame the families, we blame the community with this cultural deficit framework — rather than saying, ‘No, it’s the system, it’s the institutions that are actually failing.’ ”
Schools reflect the societal actions, norms and policies that adults enact, Green said. Curriculum — and attending school — can thus feel pointless for students, he said.
“We’re seeing children who are saying, ‘Hey, I don’t want to go to school because this isn’t relevant to my life,’ ” Green said. “Yeah, you can teach me about the New Mexico frontier — which is important and all this stuff — but that’s not relevant when, literally, I’m seeing the decline of democratic institutions; I’m seeing inter-ethnic fighting and racism, sexism, vitriol all over the internet; my family’s struggling.”
A Legislative Finance Committee action plan published in April found an estimated 32,000 youth in New Mexico are neither in school nor working. Nearly 23% of these youth are Black non-Hispanic, according to the plan.
‘More work to do’
The first step in improving Black student outcomes is ensuring the Public Education Department is curating school atmospheres where students feel safe and valued, said Black Education Act manager Kimberly York. A truly culturally responsive curriculum provides psychological safety for a child, she said.
“It provides for a more holistic approach at achieving outcomes for students, because we’re not just looking at them as bodies in a chair in a classroom,” York said. “We’re really looking at them as holistic people who need holistic levels of support.”
Gabriela Campos/The New Mexican
Rachel Altobelli, senior director of Library Services and Instructional Materials for Albuquerque Public Schools said she asks textbook publishers a series of questions about representation before selecting instructional materials for the district: Who was involved in creating the materials? Which multilingual learner experts were consulted? Who was invited on the advisement board?
The passage of the Black Education Act in 2021 did not change the way Altobelli approached her job, she said, but it did reinforce that Albuquerque Public Schools needed to continue to work harder and incorporate more perspectives into its curriculum.
“When legislation gets passed like that, it’s an indication that we have more work to do,” Altobelli said.
Altobelli also screens potential instructional materials for whether representation is embedded throughout — not just in one specific section or for one specific subject.
“We don’t want the call-out box kind of representation,” she said. “… We want everything in the core textbooks because that’s what everybody’s reading.”
Green said he thinks school districts and educators should prioritize teaching students how to be critical thinkers and problem solvers. The focus of education should be on training students to be global citizens rather than training them for the workforce, he said.
“We want them to be a global citizen in the vein that they can build something new, something that’s prosperous,” Green said. “That’s where I come from in this curriculum discussion, because the hyper-militarism, the excuse of structural violence against Black, Indigenous, people of color, the exclusion of LGBTQIA history, women only being seen as diversity tokenism — I mean, this is problematic, and this is why we see the division in our country.”
Public input
The new curriculum guide comes as the Public Education Department seeks input from students and parents about Black education more broadly in New Mexico. A listening session in Albuquerque last week yielded dismal turnout: Teachers who attended were largely already directly involved in the Black Education Act, and no students showed up.
The department is looking for more meaningful, “outside of the box” ways to connect with families, York said, like celebratory events.
“I think it’s always us having a listening ear and always being willing to learn,” she said.
Garcia noted New Mexican families are busy — and giving up an evening or weekend is a big ask. The department plans to look into going into community spaces “so that we’re not always making them come to us,” she said.
At last week’s listening session, attendees floated the idea of a Black education-centered newsletter. Some suggested outreach in churches or midday events to catch people on their lunch breaks.
Green echoed the importance of meeting people where they are.
“Go out into community and knock on doors,” he said.
