Mexico City - All indications are that the first structural reform initiative passed this year, the amendment to Article 3 of the Constitution, will have to be repealed, or at least enter into a sort of gravitational suspension, because what has been advanced in discussion of it by the teachers movement, and what is being proposed to regulate it, go against the content, approach and direction of the reform.
MV Note: The National Union of Education Workers, SNTE, is the sole teachers union; the National Coordinating Committee of Education Workers, CNTE, is the union's powerful dissident wing.For now the reform is being discussed in separate forums organized by the Secretariat of Government Affairs [SEGOB] and the National Coordinating Committee of Education Workers (CNTE), in events driven by the Education Commission of the Chamber of Deputies, in universities and other educational institutions, where they are covering the 60 days that were proposed by the SEP [Secretariat of Public Education] to formulate the respective regulatory law.
From the perspective of the direct stakeholders in the educational process (union organizations, members of the Governing Board of the National Institute for Educational Evaluation [INEE], experts and researchers, heads of schools, principals and academic communities, and civil society groups), it has been shown that the discussions have reached such a high level of conceptual and programmatic articulation--and in many cases, even common sense--that [the discussion] is proceeding in a direction contrary to what was approved in the constitutional reform.
Among the topics discussed and very widely known are the following:
- Some leading members of the newly appointed Board of Governors of the INEE have insisted that it is technically and methodologically contradictory and incorrect to apply a single standard test without considering the diversity, heterogeneity and economic, social and cultural inequality of those involved in the processes of teaching-learning across the country; likewise,
- Experienced teachers have brought up the more profound inequality, such as the teachers who work in communities of Chiapas, Oaxaca and Guerrero, or where exceptional circumstances are endured for their [professional] performance, as in Michoacán.
Also stressed is the absurdity of further polarizing and extending the conflict with teachers in the states mentioned and many others--for holding a "sword of Damocles" that undermines the labor rights of education workers. There are already thousands of amparos [protective injunctions] and looming lawsuits that may mushroom as soon as results of the so-called "universal evaluation" become known and begin to be implemented. Recent data from the ENLACE test, which was administered in the shadow of the fraudulent sale of the exam, realizes that the best magician can get rabbits out of the hat without any control, especially when the scale of the creeping corruption that continues to weave between governments and the SNTE [National Union of Education Workers] leadership is known.
Excerpted from article published in the 1911 edition of Proceso magazine, now in circulation.