Mexico: Education Reforms Under Siege
Will education reform happen in Mexico?
BY GABRIEL SANCHEZ ZINNY
Lucia, a resident of Mexico City, was stuck
in traffic for nearly seven hours. Pedro, from Guatemala, couldn’t make it home
after protesters forced the airport to close, cancelling his flight.
These stories will sound familiar to anyone who
experienced the chaos in Mexico over the past weeks. The disorder stemmed from
striking teachers unions, which took to the streets to protest imminent changes
to the country’s education system – and whether or not Lucia and Pedro were
interested in education reform, they received a crash course in the contentious
politics of the debate currently unfolding there.
This debate is certainly welcome, overdue as
it is. Indeed, improving Mexico’s education quality is crucial to its future.
In the latest OECD international rankings, Mexico scores nearly 70 points below the OECD average in
reading, and even further down in math and science. Less than one percent of
students achieve “excellence” in math – compared to 30 percent that do in Hong
Kong. Most Mexican students – 54 percent – don’t even finish a basic level of
secondary education, and only 10 percent graduate with a university degree.
Unfortunately, it is also clear that money is
not the root of the problem, and thus not a quick solution. Mexico has the
highest levels of education spending in the OECD, as a percentage of GDP, and
more of that money goes to teacher salaries than in any other OECD country.
Thus reforms to the system must go deeper than simply throwing more money at
the problem.
But already in the course of his young
administration, President Pena Nieto has proven to be reform-minded. He has
threatened many of the status quo coalitions that have defined the Mexican
political economy by pushing for market-oriented reforms in the energy,
telecommunications, and banking sectors in order to attract much needed
investment and spark job creation. But he has also realized that upgrading the
Mexican economy will be a challenge without better human capital, which is why
he has placed education reform at the forefront of his agenda.
Mexico’s Congress passed the implementing legislation
for this overhaul in September, the precipitating event sending the teachers
into the streets. The reform includes deep changes to the teacher tenure
system, including the creation of a new national evaluation institute that will
prepare exams that all teachers must pass. In addition, the new law will inject
competition into the teacher hiring system by changing the current rule that
only graduates of the teacher’s university can be eligible for hire.
Finally, the notorious practice of teachers
transferring or outright selling their positions to family or friends will be
outlawed, and full time union workers will no longer be able to collect an
additional teacher salary.
While teacher tenure and evaluation reforms
have generated the most visceral opposition, there are less visible provisions
that will be perhaps even more important in the long run. “First and foremost”,
says David Calderon, executive director of Mexicanos Primero, an advocacy group
that has a key role in pushing for the reform “the legislation enshrines in law
the right of every Mexican to a quality education, with the emphasis on
quality. Ensuring universal education does little without that dedication to
quality”.
Equally important are the reform’s efforts to
engage parents in the education system as never before. The law foresees parents
taking part in councils that help supervise schools and budgets, evaluation
systems, and curriculums. The Mexican Competitiveness Institute
(IMCO) is also pursuing innovative ways to increase parent participation, such
as with the Improve Your School project, a database that aggregates school data
and gives both parents and policymakers the ability to compare progress at both
public and private schools.
Given the protests, one might be forgiven for
thinking that the only stakeholders involved in the controversy are the unions
and the government. But what about those most affected by education system, who
stand to benefit the most from reforms – the students and their parents? What
do they think about the proposed changes?
In fact, polls in Mexico have consistently
shown public frustration with the state of education and majority support for
reform. According to the Center for Public Opinion and Social Studies (CESOP),
persistent majorities of the public support education reform,
and 52 percent expect that it will substantially improve Mexican education. In
contrast, only 20 percent of those respondents sympathize with the aims of the
teacher protests. Other national polling shows that a full 88
percent of the Mexican public supports the creation of a teacher evaluation
system.
Most recently, the UN sponsored “MyWorld”
survey of over 36,000 Mexican citizens clearly demonstrates the place that
education occupies in their concerns: across all age groups and genders,
respondents have placed quality
education as their primary concern, above healthcare and better job
opportunities. The MyWorld survey has asked the same question of more than 1.3
million people in the 193 member states of the UN, and they all come to the same conclusion: education must be priority
number one.
President Pena Nieto is an apt politician,
who has recognized that public opinion favors change, even if the entrenched
interests don’t. He has said that “in the coming months we will be writing the
future of Mexico." This may be true, but the hardest work is yet to come.
Gabriel
Sanchez Zinny is president of Kuepa.com, a Latin American Blended
Learning company, working in incorporating technologies to reduce drop out
rates. Follow him on Twitter at @gzinny. He wrote this column for Latinvex.
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