Sinembargo: Jorge Javier Romero Vadillo*
These days, in a messy legislative process, the secondary laws that will implement the educational counter-reform of President López Obrador [based on changes to the Constitution's Article Three on education] are about to be passed by Congress. With this, the attempt to dismantle the corporatist arrangement that has prevailed in Mexican education since 1943 will be buried.
MV Note: Corporatism was the system used by the state party, the PRI, the Party of the Institutional Revolution by which they "incorporated" major labor unions and small farmers' organizations into the party-government structure by subsidizing them or providing other benefits. With the National Union of Education Workers (SNTE), it gave them control of appointments of teachers to jobs and their promotions to administrative positions in exchange for members' political support and work in getting out voters for elections. The Peña Nieto government (2012-18) passed constitutional amendments and implementing secondary laws as part of an education reform that took back government control of the selection and promotion of teachers via competitive examinations. Teachers holding jobs had to pass exams every three years to retain their positions.
Although corporatism served to make the professors mostly - throughout the classic era of the PRI regime - loyal and disciplined militants and operators for the official party, it was catastrophic for the quality of learning in the country.
The 2013 reform attempt had the explicit objective of dismantling union control over the entire system of teacher admission, promotion and job permanence, the essence of the corporate arrangement, since the institutional framework on which it was based had produced a system of incentives in which what was rewarded was following union orders and political loyalty, not good professional performance.
The educational reform failed due to a dramatic design error: the new system, reflected in the repealed Law of the Professional Teaching Service, emphasized negative incentives derived from the nature of the evaluation [if a teacher failed the exam three years in a row they would be removed from their teaching position and given a non-teaching job to maintain their constitutional right to job permanency] and it did not generate positive incentives to make the change attractive to practicing teachers [e.g. to design and provide inservice training addressing a teacher's weaknesses]. A crucial change was thrown out due to stubbornness in copying the model of the movement of the educational reform of the United States, which even in that country had been conflicted and failed.
The cost of that error was that a promising institutional reform could not be consolidated and destroying it became a political flag of the current President of the Republic, who saw in his repeated clamor to reverse “the badly named educational reform” the opportunity to attract the electoral support of the two main currents of the teachers' union, the National Union of Education Workers and that of its radicalized offshoot, the National Coordinator of Education Workers [CNTE], The latter [a subdivision of the larger union] is allegedly a critic of the main union, but is equally a defender of the corporate status quo, from which it has obtained abundant benefits [control over the education systems in the states where it controls the national union's state "sections".] It allowed the two union sectors to control a large slice of public income and gave them enormous political power, by converting thousands of teachers into captive clientele of the party in power.
The constitutional counter-reform could be tempered to some extent thanks to the activism of academic specialists in education issues, which avoided a total reversal, although the final result of the newly changed Third Article of the Constitution is full of baroque wording that left open the loopholes which will allow the secondary legislation to be passed without palliative aspects [Mexican legislation is famous for its convoluted baroque language which leaves room for many interpretations]. This process will be completed in the next few days, if the delays produced by the permanent blackmail [sit-ins around the entrances of the Chamber of Deputies, the lower house of Congress] by the CNTE, a very unreliable ally of the current party in power [AMLO´s Morena, Movement for National Regeneration], come to an end.
What is about to materialize in the new legislation is the renewal of corporatism with which traditionally, for almost eight decades, the Mexican State has ruled the Mexican teaching profession, now with the two union currents as partners, instead of just the old monopoly of the SNTE.
Once again, the law will make the trade union organizations a deliberative and decisive part in the process of admission and promotion of teachers, while consolidating the decadent monopoly of the normal schools in the training of teachers, instead of making the entire higher education system responsible for the production of the teachers that the country requires. If public and private universities had professional teacher training courses, which competed on equal terms with the antiquated and abandoned normal schools, the professional level of teachers would most likely improve substantially.
On the other hand, with the pending legislation, the opening achieved in 2013, which was an advance over the previous arrangement, will be brought to an end. The original public education system, when it was initiated [in the early 1920s] was justified as a guarantee of secularism in teacher training [previous to the Mexican Revolution (1910-1917) virtually all schooling was done in parochial schools by nuns of the Catholic Church]. However, in practice, it functioned to provide the initial space for union control of recruitment and, later, for the automatic placement of normal school graduates in permanent jobs. These were the first steps in the stagnation of Mexican educational quality.
The crux of corporatist renewal is found in Section IV of Article 49 of the draft legislation of the new General Law of the System for Teachers' Careers because that is where the renewed role of union representations will come into play. It will be allowed to intervene with “observations” that will be taken into account by the SEP in establishing the order of priority when granting positions to teachers who pass the selection exam. Again, teachers will enter the system thanks to union favors and not on their own merits. Instead of being independent professors, masters of their own careers, they will be encouraged, as always, to maintain clientelist relationships, as new teachers will be in debt to the favor of union leaderships.
Also, if the legislation is passed, manipulated by the new blackmail of the CNTE, that organization that openly presents itself as anti-system will, according to its alternative education proposal, which the President of the Republic condescendingly received, intend to teach disobedience and resistance "to institutional, cultural and consumerist impositions as the primary counter-hegemonic [anti-neoliberal] actions." The CNTE is an organization that aims to turn public schools into training centers for its alleged revolution, in violation of the constitutional function of public education. The schools under CNTE control will be at the service of a particular ideology, and not as a space for the development of human capital and leverage to combat inequality of opportunity. The education of millions of children in the poorest and most deprived areas of the country will be left in the hands of that organization [the CNTE controls the union, and, thereby, the system in these poorer, more indigenous southern states]. That is the size of the regression. Spanish original
*Jorge Javier Romero Vadillo is a political scientist, professor and researcher in the Department of Politics and Culture of the Autonomous Metropolitan University, Xochimilco Campus. He holds a masters in Political Science from the National Autonomous University of Mexico and a doctorate from the Faculty of Political Science and Sociology of the University Complutense of Madrid. He is a regular contributing columnist for Sinembargo. @Giorgioromero
The crux of corporatist renewal is found in Section IV of Article 49 of the draft legislation of the new General Law of the System for Teachers' Careers because that is where the renewed role of union representations will come into play. It will be allowed to intervene with “observations” that will be taken into account by the SEP in establishing the order of priority when granting positions to teachers who pass the selection exam. Again, teachers will enter the system thanks to union favors and not on their own merits. Instead of being independent professors, masters of their own careers, they will be encouraged, as always, to maintain clientelist relationships, as new teachers will be in debt to the favor of union leaderships.
Also, if the legislation is passed, manipulated by the new blackmail of the CNTE, that organization that openly presents itself as anti-system will, according to its alternative education proposal, which the President of the Republic condescendingly received, intend to teach disobedience and resistance "to institutional, cultural and consumerist impositions as the primary counter-hegemonic [anti-neoliberal] actions." The CNTE is an organization that aims to turn public schools into training centers for its alleged revolution, in violation of the constitutional function of public education. The schools under CNTE control will be at the service of a particular ideology, and not as a space for the development of human capital and leverage to combat inequality of opportunity. The education of millions of children in the poorest and most deprived areas of the country will be left in the hands of that organization [the CNTE controls the union, and, thereby, the system in these poorer, more indigenous southern states]. That is the size of the regression. Spanish original
*Jorge Javier Romero Vadillo is a political scientist, professor and researcher in the Department of Politics and Culture of the Autonomous Metropolitan University, Xochimilco Campus. He holds a masters in Political Science from the National Autonomous University of Mexico and a doctorate from the Faculty of Political Science and Sociology of the University Complutense of Madrid. He is a regular contributing columnist for Sinembargo. @Giorgioromero