The educational reform puts the cart before the horse. Instead of placing the big national education issues (inequality and backwardness) [front and center], it establishes quality of teaching as the main challenge to be addressed at this stage. Instead of respecting the country's multi-ethnic and multicultural nature, it violates them by setting out standardized mechanisms for evaluation.
Despite the fact that its explicit aim is to improve the quality of education, [the reform] never precisely defines what is meant by it and when it does, the end result is nonsense, cumbersome and incomprehensible. The new constitutional language says: education
"will be quality, based on continuous improvement and the highest academic achievement of those educated".According to the reform's promoters, the central tool for achieving quality teaching is teacher evaluation--an evaluation understood as a measure of the knowledge of students and teachers by means of universal administration of exams in multiple choice format.
The new standard forgets that in order to evaluate teachers one must first define what kind of teachers the education system requires; and, moreover, that to do that, it is necessary that a national pedagogical project has been previously established. The education reform does none of this.
The view that evaluation is the miracle cure for all ills of the education system does not hold up. It isn't even supported by most of the education specialists who were summoned by the Senate as candidates for the governing board of the National Institute for Evaluation of Education (INEE).
The view that evaluation is the miracle cure for all ills of the education system does not hold up. It isn't even supported by most of the education specialists who were summoned by the Senate as candidates for the governing board of the National Institute for Evaluation of Education (INEE).
It is enlightening to review the opinions of the fifteen academics and former pedagogical officials who testified on April 17 during 10-minute speeches before the Senate. Many of them make an implicit devastating criticism of substantial parts of the education reform. Of course, most legislators did not seem to realize it.
A number of experts pointed out the:
A number of experts pointed out the:
- Lack of equity in educational services as the central problem of education, the
- Serious challenges that this implies for any evaluation of education, and the
- Problem of carrying out [evaluation] in a standardized way.
For example, Benilde García explained how the unequal distribution of wealth and cultural resources has segmented the types of educational services, which results in a large number of schools with precarious infrastructure and equipment. She gave the example of the diversity of conditions in which teachers work:
"in a little over two-fifths of the country's elementary schools, a teacher serves all grades, and in one-fifth of those schools, the teachers are not professionals but young people set up with secondary [junior high] or high school [degrees], who stay one or two years and are then replaced."Therefore, she urged,
"recognition of both the diversity of teaching situations and their common dimensions, both of which must be reflected in the evaluation system developed by the INEE."She recommended adopting
"an evaluation strategy by means of the utilization of meaningful tasks that are appropriate to the education work at different levels and for types of education, so in those it becomes evident that the concept of achieving high levels of teacher performance is not considered to be an event, but a process that requires constant monitoring and support for the teaching endeavor."
Many of the candidates shattered the hope of considering evaluation as the magic key for solving the lack of quality teaching. Sylvia Schmelkes, who has been named president of the INEE's Governing Board, stated that
"the quality of education does not improve with evaluation (...) instead, the quality of education improves as a result of the transformation of teaching practice."
Lorenza Villa warned that evaluation should neither be overemphasized nor converted into an end in itself. In a similar vein,
- Eduardo Backhoff declared that: "Evaluation by itself does not solve any problem."
- Ángel Díaz Barriga insisted that [evaluation] "is not enough to achieve a profound change in education."
- Teresa Bracho noted that "by itself, evaluation does not generate changes in the system."
The researchers moved away from the hope of using multiple-choice tests to evaluate teachers. Maria Luisa Chavoya suggested that evaluation
"must begin by considering that they also form a diverse universe, and that in fact one can't use the same yardstick to measure what is diverse. It isn't possible to evaluate teachers and students with a simple test."Gilberto Guevara Niebla pointed out:
"The evaluation must be de-mystified and humanized. To de-mystify it means that it must be seen as an element of education and not as its sole and chief determinant. To humanize it means that evaluation must be made visible to the teachers, because up to now it has been invisible."The diverse and unequal nature of the country--and of education--demands a flexible vision regarding evaluation. Silvia Schmelkes warned that
"evaluation also runs the risk of aiming to standardize educational purposes and of basing judgments on criteria that do not take diversity into account."
Tiburcio Moreno called for
"replacing a culture of evaluation characterized by control, punishment and accreditation with a culture of democratic evaluation that is fair, participatory and itself educational."
This is a recommendation--one of many more contained in the more than 89 pages of the minutes of the appearance of the specialists before the Senate--that the Secretariat of Public Education and the legislators would do well to attend to, even though the will to do so isn't apparent in some of them. They prefer to get on with their dogmas and put the cart before the horse. Spanish original