La Jornada: Editorial
Last week, the regional discussion forums on the education reform was agreed by the National Coordinator of Government Workers. The discussions began yesterday in Michoacán with hundreds of teachers widely rejecting the modifications to Articles 3 and 73 of the Constitution. The modifications are endorsed in the context of the so-called "Pact for Mexico", which, in recent months, have given way to the discontentment of educational sectors and worrying political tension, especially in regions such as Guerrero, Michoacán and Oaxaca.
Furthermore, these discussion forums happened just days after a widespread education and social movement, whose protests lasted for months, managed to scrap any standardized reading and mathematics tests in secondary schools in Seattle. These tests aimed to evaluate the performance of students, teachers and educational institutions in this North American metropolis.
The action taken by teachers, students and parents in Seattle constitutes a much wider rebellion in the neighboring country against education reforms very similar to the one that is planned in our own country. The reforms are based on a reductionist and unfair approach of education and educational evaluation. They are also ineffective as far as the eradication of educational deficiencies is concerned--which are persisting and deepening in the entire U.S. education system--consequently revealing a system that attacks public schools whilst favoring the creation of private business opportunities. An example of this is the recent closure of around 50 schools in deprived areas of Chicago whose pupils are mainly African American and Mexican; students will be reassigned to the so-called "charter" schools that are publicly funded but privately managed.
Faced with the evidence of the disrepute of the standardized educational evaluation paradigm in its country of origin, and in light of the development of the social and educational efforts to replace it, it is hard to understand the move to continue with these measure and deepen this very same model in countries like ours, where social inequality conditions and abandonment of the educational system and institutions in charge of the State are much more evident than in the United States. In our country, educational discontent, immersed in a much weaker and withered institutional environment than in the U.S., could become a factor of lawlessness and social explosiveness.
The presence of the discussion forums that started yesterday in Michoacán is undoubtedly an important change regarding the unilateral nature in which the education reform was imposed on Congress. At the very least, it also shows the readiness of the education and legislative authorities to listen to the arguments against education reform and to the sectors that are critical of it. However, that is not enough. It is also necessary for these dialogues to take place in proper environments for such discussions in order to rectify the mistakes made in the recent constitutional modification process, starting with the absurdity of approving a reform such as that debated through an arrangement by those in power, without discussing it with the teaching profession. Attention and analysis is also needed regarding the damaging results that have been generated the same policies in other countries that are currently being adopted in our own. Spanish original