In 1996-1997, when the massively standardized evaluation (unique examination) was first administered, a strong urban movement emerged because more than simply diagnose, it sought to decide who had the right to go to school and where, and who should not even go to school. Now in 2013, many protests and many years later, evaluation (as a central part of education reform) is once again at the center of a deep confrontation over education, and it already faces an increasingly complicated picture.
One of the most important reasons for this new crisis is the fact that the approach is now very different from twenty years ago. Back then protection came from respected education institutions like the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and the National Polytechnic Institute (IPN), which managed to hide their deep privatizing and discriminatory veins. Today, as Luis Hernández Navarro demonstrated (La Jornada, June 18, 2013 [sic]; June 4, 2013), only the entrepreneurs (and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development [OECD]) are declared authors and winners with the reform (symptomatically, "when is now" says Mexicanos Primero [business-oriented civic organization]) ....
Besides being applied to education, this simplistic and mechanical view of social reality leads to such nineteenth century postulates as improvement is achieved with a strong authority, with testing, sanctions and dismissals, but it is also reflected in one of the messier and more authoritarian (and contested) processes of constitutional change held in living memory. The procedure in the chambers [upper and lower houses of Congress] lasted scarcely ten days. It was not preceded by any analysis or minimal consultation, and the secondary texts of laws [regulations for implementing the reform bill] merely confirmed the aggressive nature of the comprehensive bill. Even more grave, the evaluation is now shown to be, just like years ago, an essentially punitive instrument (before exclusionary, now layoffs), with which from the very first removes teachers and society as possible promoters of quality.
It is a business reform that also appears deeply hostile to processes of strengthening pluralism and regional identities--starting with the Zapatistas, who have not even been officially recognized two decades later. Thus, refusal to support the reform for creation of state agencies for evaluation (as required in Guerrero and Oaxaca) contradicts the fact that for years in Sinaloa, Sonora, Nuevo León and even in the state of Mexico there have been state institutes for evaluation.
The unique nature of the current evaluation monopolized by a national authority, the National Institute for Educational Evaluation (INEE), simply reflects the corporate-governmental centralization that another national center, the CENEVAL [National Center for Evaluation of Higher Education], began two decades ago with the same promises. Eliminating standardized tests (suggested by the SEP [National Union of Education Workers]) reduces but does not resolve the problem. Instead it proposes that tens of thousands of INEE evaluators visit all schools to observe and grade teachers according to a single profile of traits that define a good teacher. That is, it means another single standard instrument for the entire country, centralized in the INEE (where there is not even one of the teachers to be evaluated). It is the product of an approach that is eminently discretional, although it is proclaimed to be "expert" or "scientific", and it would categorize teachers as something like "insufficient", "elementary", "good", "excellent", such as the National Assessment of Academic Achievement in Schools (ENLACE) does with students.
Unlike in the past, however, what is behind the profound energy of the teachers' movement is the struggle of communities, peoples and regions to reclaim Mexico for what it is, a nation constitutionally plural. It is a struggle that is not just marches and strikes, but which has materialized in a long and patient construction of multiple projects in education (and evaluation) in Chiapas, Guerrero, Oaxaca, Michoacán, Puebla and other states. Given this, a return to uniformity not only denies the current situation, it is a relapse.
To the Michoacán teachers in solidarity with their grief over the loss of colleagues.
*Hugo Aboites studied philosophy in Italy and Mexico and earned the Master's and Ph.D. in Education from Harvard University, where he taught as visiting professor. Since 1980 he has been a professor and researcher in the Department of Education and Communication at the Autonomous Metropolitan University at Xochimilco (UAM-X) in Mexico City. Spanish original