I'm very unfamiliar with New Mexico (having only been a tourist in Albuquerque and Santa Fe for a few days), but according to U.S. News it ranks 50 out of 50 for education: https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/rankings/education. Given some level of geographic mobility it doesn't seem like a place I would want to raise a child.

Am I mistaken? Thoughts?

50 out of 50, plus the District of Columbia, for 8 consecutive years. I recently spent a few weeks as a instructional assistant in a New Mexico high school classroom. I saw nothing but highly dedicated professional teachers doing their best. But student performance is astonishingly low. I felt like running through the halls screaming like my hair was on fire, but there is very little in the way of alarm or anything but a few changes around the edges.

I went to a school board meeting, where they voted to spend tens of thousands of dollars on a tire alignment machine for the shop class. I would rather have seen it spent on online math instruction, but I could see their point of view: they want to graduate students who have a chance to get a job, and the academic side of the school is not providing it, and not trending in that direction. So they spent the money where they saw some hope.

If you can afford to do better than public school for your children in New Mexico, it's an imperative.

You have to look at variability. The cities are doing ok, but it is out in the rural areas, and the reservations specifically, where there are going to be extreme negative outcomes. There are areas on some of the reservations that are yet to be electrified as an illustration of just what kind of challenges NM is up against.

The thing to keep in mind about New Mexico is that there are totally fine public schools here and there - Rio Rancho maybe, Las Cruces has some maybe, maybe some random ones in a few more remote small towns, Los Alamos, etc., but the state as a whole is extremely poor and has lots of reservations and pueblos which have huge complicated histories to overcome.

I will say that (and this is 20+ years out of date) coming from a good for New Mexico public school put me about a year ahead of everyone else in a decent California public school when we moved.

So overall my main point is that you probably want to look at schools on some kind of basis other than the state overall, especially in states like NM and AZ.

I'd also not want to move there to raise a child, but turns out people live there non-the-less - and the people who'd qualify for this program are the people who can't just pick up and move to California or New Jersey.

New Mexico is a very strange beast. It wants to be progressive and green, but is basically an oil state. There is a widespread poverty mindset of low expectations which prevents change because people are used to the way things are and don't want change. Crime is high, education is bad, health care is bad. Stupid drivers. Lots of corruption.

But you can have a pretty nice, affordable living in places like Taos, Santa Fe, Los Alamos and parts of Las Cruces and Albuquerque.

Like with choosing to live anywhere you shouldn't be looking at state level education for your child's education. That would be stupid.