The education reform of the government of Enrique Peña Nieto does not set forward a true transformation of the national education system. All that was adopted was essentially a limited set of initiatives related to the labor interaction between the ranks of teachers and the federal government and to teacher evaluation, pointed out Imanol Ordorika, education expert from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM).
In Ordorika's view, a true education reform must begin with a recognition of the system's inequality and heterogeneity and then propose its re-conceptualization.
"We must discuss what is education, for what and given the current international context, how to educate today's Mexicans. And this overlooks a profound philosophical, pedagogical and historical implication.''The expert from the Institute of Economic Research and currently director of UNAM's Institutional Evaluation, recalled that a few months ago the UNAM presented a series of proposals for redefining the national education system. The set of proposals was developed by more than sixty specialists, but so far they have neither been taken up by the government nor has its substance been addressed in the education reform passed by Congress and discussed in state legislatures.
''The central focus must go beyond the labor relationship between teachers and government. We must extend educational thinking and translate it into policies and standards. We must go beyond what has been approved, which is not nearly enough to have an impact on improving education, either its coverage [availability] or its quality."
He stressed that the lack of resources for the sector demonstrates that the educational reform is not real.
"It takes a real financial commitment by the Mexican State, but the first education budget of Peña Nieto's government has only one real increase of 0.57 percent over the previous year, which is less than the increase in all federal government spending, which grew by 2.87 percent.''He added that the idea has also been promoted that it is the teachers who are the cause of the national education crisis, but quite to the contrary, the teachers should enhance and not submit to processes (testing) that are coercive, punitive and threatening.
"They have disseminated a superficial and distorted image of Mexican teachers, which applies only to the bureaucracy and the leadership of the National Union of Education Workers (SNTE), when [the truth is that] teachers throughout the country, under incredibly adverse conditions, give the best of their ability to educate.''A real education reform must listen and incorporate the proposals of Mexican teachers, their experiences and visions, and the opinions of experts and researchers in the field, which was not done for the guidelines being discussed today in the state legislatures.
Meanwhile, César Navarro from the National Pedagogic University (UPN), indicated that teachers' voices must be heard, and [reform] cannot be the product of an agreement among the party leadership. The expert noted that the education reform promoted by Peña Nieto, and supported by members of the Pact for Mexico, aims to take away the labor rights of teachers under the guise of educational quality. Spanish original
*Imanol Ordorika Sacristán (b. Mexico City, October 31, 1958) is a Mexican social activist, political leader, academic and intellectual. Ordorika obtained masters degrees in education (1993) and sociology (1998); and a Ph.D in social sciences and education from Stanford University School of Education (1999). A full professor at UNAM since 2002, Ordorika is a renowned faculty member and higher education specialist in Mexico and abroad. He has written extensively on power relations and politics within post-secondary institutions, faculty and student movements, higher education policy and on the impact of globalization on colleges and universities.