Mexico: ENLACE Student Achievement Test - Does It Improve Education?

La Jornada: Marta de Jesús López Aguilar*

Despite the failure of the education reform in the United States based on standardized tests based on a business scheme, and faced with the rebellion of students, parents and teachers [e.g., Seattle] for the lack of results in educational improvement after ten years of implementation, [this 'reform'] has increased exclusion, segregation and racism by closing schools attended by African Americans and Latinos [e.g., Chicago]. Only teachers are blamed for poor results, [teachers'] precarious working conditions are deepened, and thousands of teachers are laid off. Finally, there is a weakening of trade unions and greater corporate intervention (La Jornada,1/6/13).

In Mexico, Peña Nieto's administration seeks to impose education reform similar to that in the United Stated with a continuity beginning with Salinas [President Carlos Salinas, 1988-1994], that demonstrates its failure since 1994 [when NAFTA was signed], when a standardized test of Spanish and mathematics was administered to students in third through sixth grade and in the ninth grade to assess student achievement as a factor in evaluating teachers in the Professional Teaching Career. 

In 2006 the National Examination for Academic Achievement from Schools (ENLACE) was administered to all students in third through sixth grades [elementary school], and in seventh through ninth grade [middle school] and high school level, and by selling the fictitious-axiomatic-commercial idea that "the greater number of evaluations the higher the educational quality". Despite the impressive array of technical resources whose high costs were absorbed by the education budget, these standardized tests were never subjected to a process of diagnosis, follow-up and evaluation of results.

To achieve a supposed "education quality", the government considers evaluation as a means and an end in itself for pragmatic and a priori education reform. Beginning on June 3, 2013, the ENLACE standardized test will be administered to 15.7 million primary and middle school students. The characteristics of the ENLACE test may be described as:

• Standardized: To regulate, regiment, limit and make uniform the behavior and knowledge of students and teachers, with a single thought.
• Census: Defines the criterion for how many test-takers achieve a certain amount of measurable knowledge [correct answers].
• Measurement: In order to obtain a figure that allows comparison of students, teachers, schools, regions, states and countries, reducing them to statistics.
• Multiple choice: Supposedly there is one correct answer and the score is accurate....
• Ambiguous and confusing: ... several or all of the answers are correct; or [the correct answer] is not given, or there are questions and answers that are not understood [poorly worded].
• Rigid: Based on an axiom; ordered, unilateral or partial for measuring a kind of knowledge that sets aside other knowledge, skills, and abilities of students and teachers.
• Exhaustive: It contains long and tedious readings without precise linkage to the answers. There are mathematical problems that are difficult to understand and solve in the time allotted.
• Pragmatic: It aims to search for an "ideal" focused on immediate success, starting from the results obtained and not as a learning process for life over the longer term.
• Anti-pedagogical: Developed ​​outside of the interests of student, of teaching and teachers, outside of the plans and programs of study of the interactions and experiences that occur during the learning process.
• External: By distancing from this process, it becomes an event that comes from outside, oblivious to what happens in classrooms.
• Fragmented and partial: Knowledge induces a fragmented view of reality. The verbal and mathematical reasoning is only one part of the process of cognition and assessment. Cognitive and psycho-motor training of students doesn't matter.
• Categorization: It labels students, teachers and schools according to their [test] results.
• De-contextualized and inequitable: It does not consider ethnic, cultural, regional, geographical or linguistic differences and overlooks various student populations: e.g., students with disabilities, street children.
• Classist: Poor students in poor schools obtain unfavorable results, since the test is designed from the culture and language of the middle class and leaves out the worldview of poor children, indigenous children, rural children and children from marginalized areas.
• Discriminatory: It does not address community, bilingual or intercultural education. It imposes a single, homogeneous thought, by means of reactive and uniform answers, violating the rights of indigenous peoples and provoking the ethnocide of cultures.
• Exclusionary and authoritarian: Without the participation of students, teachers and parents in the process of preparing the test. Specialists and academics agree that standardized tests are imprecise, superficial and limited; further, they [specialists and academics] were not consulted.
• Punitive: It contains penalties for schools, teachers and students with low test scores.
• Behavioural: In addition to centering education on memorization and measurement, it punishes [poor results] with [teacher] dismissal and rewards teachers and schools with good results by means of economic stimulus.
• Instrumental-utilitarian and commercial: It imposes market criteria; that is, effectiveness, efficiency, competition, individualism and sustained productivity via meritocracy.

It's a great business for selling books and previous exams and increasing corruption by means of sales of the ENLACE for between 300 pesos [$23.60 USD] and 2,000 pesos [$157 USD]--this, despite the documented reports provided for four years by the CNTE [National Coordinating Committee of Education Workers; dissident arm of the Teachers Union].

Faced with this demonstrated evidence, the CNTE has rightly demanded the abrogation of the education reform. As part of its negotiations with the Secretariat of Government Affairs [SEGOB], it will hold nine regional forums and one national forum. The challenge is to achieve a broad message sent in a single stream, which can prevent the privatization of public education and the restriction of teachers' labor rights. With this perspective, it is essential to achieve that fewer students drop out of school and the public school might fulfill its emancipatory function necessary for building a society with an educational initiative that is fair, inclusive and democratic.

*Marta de Jesús López Aguilar is a primary teacher, an educational researcher, and author of the book "The teachers' movement in the teachers' spring of 1989" [El movimiento magisterial en la primavera magisterial de 1989]. Spanish original