Translated by Shaun Twomey
To quote: “The board of directors of the new National Institute for Educational Evaluation (INEE) and its president have both the power & the responsibility of issuing guidelines that are relevant to the ever-expanding decisions to improve the quality & equality of education.”Despite this charge, the INEE board has recently issued a document which only generalizes a few indisputable & almost no-brainer “principles” in addition to some areas of opportunity for improvement, and it points out that:
“The most precise definition of the INEE’s activities and its term depends on, among other things, the secondary legislation that is discussed in the Congress relative to the necessary reforms of the General Law of Education, the General Law of Professional Teaching Service, and the Law of INEE.”But the board of directors of the INEE and its president don’t actually have to wait for the ink to dry on secondary education laws at all to act swiftly as the current circumstances dictate, since whatever laws are passed cannot possibly limit the institute’s powers as granted by Mexico’s Constitution. Moreover, its immediate action could be decisive in the evolving civil unrest spurred on by the thousands of teachers who have mobilized themselves in protest, often times with serious consequences that they themselves don’t even want.
It isn’t enough that the board of directors simply issues politically-correct declarations… it is vital that with these declarations the INEE demonstrates its autonomy & independence from governmental authorities and the other powers that be (e.g. Organization for Economic Cooperation & Development, Televisa, and Mexicanos Primero, for example), that through irresponsible & provocative means have advanced reforms that have absolutely nothing to do with education and everything to do with threatening, authoritarian control and transforming the teaching profession into a bureaucracy.
To start, the INEE’s board of directors should publish a directive with respect to secondary education laws that congressmen and senators can discuss, since that legal framework will be crucial in “the quality and the equity of education” cited by the INEE. In the General Law of Education, the General Law of Professional Teaching Service, and the Law of INEE, certain elements of these reforms that have ignited teacher protests can be repositioned, including as one example the subject of teacher evaluations for tenure purposes.
The statement from the board of directors announced that this evaluation should be done with a constructive purpose rather than a punitive one, but lamentably, it puts the emphasis on teacher evaluation and attributes little or no importance to the evaluation of other relevant factors that influence educational outcomes which should be tantamount to all others, including:
- Physical conditions of the school;
- Social and cultural contexts which can dampen the motivation of students;
- The legal framework of the educational system (including the working drafts of recent laws); and
- Above all, the economic philosophy that pervades the educational system and is reinforced by the managerial ideology that inspired the imposed reforms
One such “guideline” that should be quickly issued by the INEE relates to the evaluations that are currently underway with teachers and that should be immediately suspended. The very same president of this institute has made public closing remarks on occasion in this vein, which include the notion that the Enalce exam [the equivalent of US-based, state-administered exams for students] should not be used to evaluate teachers and that so-called “universal evaluation” is not indicative of true teacher performance.
As Luis Hernández Navarro has shown, these criticisms were expressed during Senate hearings by 15 different candidates vying for the INEE’s top job. The authoritarian and absurd imposition of these teacher evaluation measures have been one of the causes of the nation’s recent protests, rallies, and other forms of teacher resistance. It is therefore urgent that the declarations of these education professionals, which have been thoroughly argued and which have been agreed upon by other members of INFE’s governing body, are given their rightful official place in this institution as a true directive that heeds educational authorities in accordance with new laws while ultimately creating a less harmful social atmosphere.
The INEE board’s public statement also posits that “the evaluation by itself will not improve the quality of education.” Without a doubt, the INEE’s evaluations will have to lead to actions that comply with educational authorities and also cooperate with the main actors themselves: students and teachers. But there are evaluations that in and of themselves are educational, and as a result, determinants of the quality of education. This is in fact the case with “auto-evaluations” (of students, teachers, & schools) that should form a substantial part of the National System of Educational Evaluation.
In addition, there is a central theme here in which evaluation can not only can improve the quality of education but ultimately represent it, in the form of student learning assessments (poorly referred to as “grades” today, alongside exams) that are part & parcel of the pedagogical process, the very culmination of said process, and facilitate the clear identification of what students know and do not know. The actual practice of student learning assessments is a decisive factor having direct and immediate effect on the “bad quality” of current education. However, the extent to which this measurement is associated with carrots & sticks and honor & humiliation, including the punishment of a failing grade or being expelled, carries with it the destruction of intrinsic motivation for studying, the marginalization of the value placed on knowledge, the deterioration of any possible formative function of the evaluation itself, and the perversion of the very meaning of education.
This, therefore, represents another one of INEE’s new homework assignments: to immediately tackle the task of elevating the quality of Mexican education via a different kind of “evaluation” of points 648 and 685 of the Secretariat of Public Education which concern the assessment of student performance. Spanish original