Mexico Education Reform: Recipe for Failure

La Jornada: Carlos Ímaz Gispert*

The so-called Education Reform contains nothing educational, except for its zeal for the shameful and ignorant pedagogy of the seventeenth century, which stipulated that learning happened only with the rod and that learning meant memorizing sentences or formulas. Rather, it is a labor reform disguised as an educational one, but with serious negative consequences for learning and for our children and youth.

The constitutional reform arose from actions taken by President Fox in complicity with the leadership of the SNTE (with Elba Esther Gordillo at its head), to create an institute for standardized evaluation of teachers in primary and secondary education, the results of which would be the basis for determining the hiring, promotion and continued employment of teachers. This was supplemented with making the teachers' income conditional on their students' scores on a test with the same characteristics; that is, an external test that rewards or punishes according to standardized numbers and that is not used in any country in the world to define the hiring, promotion, tenure and pay of teachers.

Beyond the fact that it is nonsense to elevate the evaluation institute to constitutional status, it must be said that in its conception and execution, "the most important players in the education process", the teachers, are ignored.  It was not created with them, but against them. Not only is their employment contract violated retroactively, but their indispensable participation is also excluded from the evaluation process. Even in the so-called evaluations of university teachers (and even when most are quantitative controls of productivity), they are carried out both in our country and in the rest of the world, by committees composed of peers and members of their own academic community.

To this, which is serious, we must add that, contrary to all educational development and the most elementary common sense, the so-called education reform:

1. Ignores the serious limitations and cultural biases that standardized tests contain;
2. Replaces the need to evaluate--an exercise primarily of qualitative processes, the actors and their conditions--with the possibility of measuring (any laborer knows it isn't the same to measure a beam as to assess its condition), making evaluation synonymous with what we believe can be measured;
3. Induces uncritical memorization over reflective understanding, reducing the evaluation to the outcome of a standardized test; and
4. Assumes a nonexistent homogeneity of those involved in the educational process (as if students, their families and teachers were equal across the country), when Mexico's abysmal economic and social exclusions and enormous cultural diversity are undeniable.

Conversely, Finland eliminated competition between students and between schools, and the insubstantial pipe dream of "academic excellence". It dispensed with the use of standardized tests as a method of evaluation for their teachers and their students. Instead, they put in the gravitational center of the teaching process the welfare of children and young people, encouraging their curiosity, creativity and thoughtfulness. It turns out that, recently, Finland agreed to implement the PISA [Program for International Student Assessment] standardized test applied worldwide by the OECD [Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development] and, to the surprise of the technocrats: it scored the highest marks!

Contrary to the aim of the reform, in Mexico "equal" teachers are not required, but ones as different as the conditions in which they work and as demanded by those with whom they work. Any teacher in the world recognizes that the social environment is crucial to what happens in the classroom, so the homogenization imagined by the technocrats, besides being a lie, means attempting to treat unequals as equals, further deepening the inequality. Moreover, this assumes the same kind of teacher is required to work in a rural community (even more so, if it is one where a language other than Spanish is spoken) as in a poor neighborhood or a middle-class, urban neighborhood and that they can be evaluated equally, or worse, a standardized test can be applied to their students in order to qualify teachers and determine their wages and retention.

No education reform in the world can thrive without the consensus and commitment of teachers, and the opposition and discontent that is overwhelmingly generated among them isn't accidental or invented, since they face a prescription that will generate educational anemia and increase the exclusion, discrimination and frustration of our children and youth. We must listen. The teachers know of what they speak. Spanish original 

*Carlos Ímaz Gispert holds bachelors and masters degrees in sociology from the Faculty of Political and Social Sciences of the National Autonomous University of Mexico [UNAM] and a doctorate in education from Stanford University. He is a full time professor in the Faculty of Political and Social Sciences of the UNAM.