Sinembargo: Jorge Javier Romero Vadillo*
President López Obrador has fulfilled his campaign promise and has thrown out the educational reform of 2013, the "bad so-called reform," according to his repetitive mantra. At the moment in which I write, the new General Law of Education, the General Law of the System for the Career of Teachers and the Regulatory Law of Article 3 of the Constitution of the United Mexican States regarding Continuous Improvement of Education are about to replace the entire legal framework with which the reform of 2013 was intended to free teachers from the yoke of their incorporation into the political party in power, create a system of incentives based on merit and establish a system of permanent evaluation of the education system as a whole.
Beyond the design errors of the reform's professional teaching service, which caused the hostility of many teachers to a system that revolved too much around the negative effects of the evaluation [if they failed an annual standardized test three years in a row, they were to be removed from their teaching position and given a non-teaching government job], the 2013 reform was an attempt to modify the institutional arrangement that had prevailed in Mexican education since the early days of the PRI regime [the Party of the Institutional Revolution, in power from the 1930s to 2000] and which was sustained by granting the union a monopoly in charge of governing the teaching profession while requiring its members to be agents of the official political party.
Beyond the design errors of the reform's professional teaching service, which caused the hostility of many teachers to a system that revolved too much around the negative effects of the evaluation [if they failed an annual standardized test three years in a row, they were to be removed from their teaching position and given a non-teaching government job], the 2013 reform was an attempt to modify the institutional arrangement that had prevailed in Mexican education since the early days of the PRI regime [the Party of the Institutional Revolution, in power from the 1930s to 2000] and which was sustained by granting the union a monopoly in charge of governing the teaching profession while requiring its members to be agents of the official political party.
It was an arrangement in which teachers were treated as captive clientele of a vertical and undemocratic organization and not as specialized professionals in charge of one of the substantive functions of the Mexican State. Today, López Obrador's counter-reform returns to the trade union organizations the control of teachers' careers and frustrates the possibility that each one of them had in their own hands the means of developing their professional life.
López Obrador's option has been to put his political alliances ahead of the need to improve the education system. He has decided to revive the bitter corporatism inherited from the first half of the last century, as a formula to guarantee political peace, at the expense of the professional autonomy of teachers and the possibility of building a system where what would be rewarded would be teachers' good classroom performance and their efforts to improve student learning day by day. The repealed legislation was undoubtedly perfectible, but the one that replaces it is nothing but the reconstruction of the governance mechanisms typical of the worst authoritarianism of the PRI's classic times.
As the Rights Education Network--a group of academic specialists in educational matters that has actively participated in the debate of the new legislation--pointed out yesterday, with the new arrangement union interference returns and is affirmed via tripartite commissions of admission, promotion and teacher recognition. These are reproductions of the old mixed commissions upon which the PRI corporate control was founded. This opens the door to the return of the sale, rent and inheritance of teaching positions, practices that have loaded down the Mexican education system, bringing it to the extremely low level of performance it currently has. It is a tangle of corruption that the President has not only decided not to clean from top to bottom with his magic handkerchief, but has decided to repeat and perpetuate. Restoration, and not transformation, is what this presidential effort entails in destroying anything that sounds like it is neoliberal
López Obrador's option has been to put his political alliances ahead of the need to improve the education system. He has decided to revive the bitter corporatism inherited from the first half of the last century, as a formula to guarantee political peace, at the expense of the professional autonomy of teachers and the possibility of building a system where what would be rewarded would be teachers' good classroom performance and their efforts to improve student learning day by day. The repealed legislation was undoubtedly perfectible, but the one that replaces it is nothing but the reconstruction of the governance mechanisms typical of the worst authoritarianism of the PRI's classic times.
As the Rights Education Network--a group of academic specialists in educational matters that has actively participated in the debate of the new legislation--pointed out yesterday, with the new arrangement union interference returns and is affirmed via tripartite commissions of admission, promotion and teacher recognition. These are reproductions of the old mixed commissions upon which the PRI corporate control was founded. This opens the door to the return of the sale, rent and inheritance of teaching positions, practices that have loaded down the Mexican education system, bringing it to the extremely low level of performance it currently has. It is a tangle of corruption that the President has not only decided not to clean from top to bottom with his magic handkerchief, but has decided to repeat and perpetuate. Restoration, and not transformation, is what this presidential effort entails in destroying anything that sounds like it is neoliberal
MV Note: One of the criticisms of the National Coordinating Committee of Education Workers (CNTE), a dissident group within the larger National Union of Education Workers (SNTE), was that the reform of 2013 was imposed by the international financial community, via the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), with the aim of focusing education on making students into standardized workers supporting international, neoliberal business rather than their own communities' needs.
Of course, the CNTE has accepted the terms of the new laws. With them, both the CNTE and the official union [the SNTE] retake control of the lion's share of the educational budget and maintain the mechanisms that make the teachers their captive hosts, ready to continue marching to the orders of the union chiefs who prosper at the cost of the quality of education for children and youth in the country.
The union goals were also achieved in that the law privileges graduates of normal schools [rural teachers colleges], the National Pedagogical University [in Mexico City] and the Teaching Continuing Education Centers in the allocation of teaching positions [guaranteeing them jobs], which violates the constitutional principle of “equality of conditions and equity”established by the reform promoted by this same government.
This also reproduces the old authoritarian arrangement, originally created to guarantee the secularism of teacher training [replacing Catholic parochial schools as the providers of education after the Mexican Revolution], but that over the years became the mechanism to guarantee teaching positions for union recruits from educational institutions also controlled by the union. In the case of the rural normal schools, they are a CNTE hotbed, with their quasi-insurrectional [i.e. Marxist] instruction.
The new legislation also degrades the body that will replace the National Institute for the Evaluation of Education [established by the 2013 reform as an autonomous agency to design and carry out evaluations of applicants for teaching positions and teachers' ongoing performance], since it names it a “commission” and converts it into a body within the SEP [Secretariat of Public Education], which violates the very constitutional reform on which it is based. Instead, this establishes that the commission shall have technical, operational, management, budgetary and decision autonomy. MORENA legislators, worried about ingratiating themselves with the union mafias, have not even had the tidiness of respecting the constitutional reform that they themselves promoted. Instead of a specialized and autonomous technical body, it will now be an office dependent on the secretary of education who will be responsible for evaluating the performance of the secretariat itself and the system as a whole.
Despite its grandiose transformative claims, what this government is doing in public education is restoring the mechanisms of the old authoritarian regime, precisely those against which democratic professors such as Othón Salazar fought, determined to free the teachers from the PRI and their condition of being captive clientele, in order to dignify their profession and achieve their autonomy.
For López Obrador, the temporary appeasement of the CNTE and the political cooperation of the SNTE is more important than the possibility of building an educational system based on autonomous and specialized professionals in charge of their own careers. He prefers submissive teachers rather than teachers who depend on their performance to achieve better salary conditions and greater social prestige. It is a setback that will have consequences for generations. 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 union goals were also achieved in that the law privileges graduates of normal schools [rural teachers colleges], the National Pedagogical University [in Mexico City] and the Teaching Continuing Education Centers in the allocation of teaching positions [guaranteeing them jobs], which violates the constitutional principle of “equality of conditions and equity”established by the reform promoted by this same government.
This also reproduces the old authoritarian arrangement, originally created to guarantee the secularism of teacher training [replacing Catholic parochial schools as the providers of education after the Mexican Revolution], but that over the years became the mechanism to guarantee teaching positions for union recruits from educational institutions also controlled by the union. In the case of the rural normal schools, they are a CNTE hotbed, with their quasi-insurrectional [i.e. Marxist] instruction.
The new legislation also degrades the body that will replace the National Institute for the Evaluation of Education [established by the 2013 reform as an autonomous agency to design and carry out evaluations of applicants for teaching positions and teachers' ongoing performance], since it names it a “commission” and converts it into a body within the SEP [Secretariat of Public Education], which violates the very constitutional reform on which it is based. Instead, this establishes that the commission shall have technical, operational, management, budgetary and decision autonomy. MORENA legislators, worried about ingratiating themselves with the union mafias, have not even had the tidiness of respecting the constitutional reform that they themselves promoted. Instead of a specialized and autonomous technical body, it will now be an office dependent on the secretary of education who will be responsible for evaluating the performance of the secretariat itself and the system as a whole.
Despite its grandiose transformative claims, what this government is doing in public education is restoring the mechanisms of the old authoritarian regime, precisely those against which democratic professors such as Othón Salazar fought, determined to free the teachers from the PRI and their condition of being captive clientele, in order to dignify their profession and achieve their autonomy.
For López Obrador, the temporary appeasement of the CNTE and the political cooperation of the SNTE is more important than the possibility of building an educational system based on autonomous and specialized professionals in charge of their own careers. He prefers submissive teachers rather than teachers who depend on their performance to achieve better salary conditions and greater social prestige. It is a setback that will have consequences for generations. 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