La Jornada: Karina Áviles
Yesterday Mexico's President published the decree establishing the State's obligation to provide education from preschool to the high school level, which involved amending several articles of the General Education Law (LGE).
The text published in the Official Journal of the Federation (DOF) indicates that federal authorities will coordinate a national diploma system to establish a common curricular framework--the same put in motion by the administration of Felipe Calderón--with respect to federalism [the states' management of education], university autonomy and educational diversity.
It is up to the states to participate in the integration and operation of a national high school education system that relies on this framework.
The high school diploma--an obligation which was an initiative of the past presidential administration--will be organized on the principle of respect for diversity through a common curriculum framework and the re-validation and recognition of studies among the options offered at this educational level.
... In any case, the rights and duties of parents or guardians are established. Among the first is to register their children in public schools so that students who meet the requirements [of each successive level] might receive compulsory education up to the high school level. Among the other obligations of parents is to assure that their children and adolescents receive education from preschool through high school.
The decree states that the State shall promote and maintain--directly and through the decentralized state education agencies, by means of financial support or by any other means--all types and forms of education, including early childhood education, special education and high school education.
When the previous government announced the proposal to mandate the high school diploma, education experts felt that the measure was absurd without first guaranteeing continuity in school, and this characteristic was fulfilled when middle school education was made mandatory.
Thus, the project as initially presented seemed more like a palliative, so that there wouldn't be young people who neither study nor work--the ninis. This came after criticism raised in reports such as that of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development [OECD] that Mexico has more than 7 million young people who are ninis.
In this regard, they emphasized that Mexico still neither covers 100 percent of middle school enrollment fees, nor has it resolved the dropout problem at either the middle school or high school levels, nor is there serious analysis of the causes of withdrawal from high school. Spanish original