Education system holding Mexico back, critics say

By David Agren, Special for USA TODAYUpdated 1h 11m ago Comments

MEXICO CITY – Pilar López's children have all gone to public schools, touted for decades as a singular achievement of Mexico's early-20th-century revolution.

The maid and mother of five has one daughter who is studying medicine at the prestigious National Polytechnic Institute. She says her children are succeeding not because of, but in spite of a system that is failing Mexicans, especially in rural poor areas.

Some schools must hold classes outdoors for lack of rooms. Others have no drinkable water, and sometimes no teachers. Though many have called for changes, the national teachers union has fought changes it doesn't support.

"There are talented students that want to get ahead but can't," López says.

Mexican public education is secular, free and accessible to all, as guaranteed in the constitution enacted in 1917, but its results are poor, according to statistics.

The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, an international economic advisory group based in Paris, says 0.7% of Mexican students reach the advanced level in the math section of the OECD's Program for International Student Assessment exam. About 10% of U.S. students reach the advanced level.

Mexico's ranking is among the worst in the OECD, putting the country at a disadvantage in an increasingly globalized world, critics say.

"This is the moment Mexico could take off and catch up with more developed countries," says David Calderón, director of Mexicanos Primero, an education advocacy group. "What's holding it back is education."

'Barely passing'

Mexicanos Primero developed the documentary de Panzazo!, slang for "barely passing," which portrays an education system controlled by the National Education Workers' Union, or SNTE, and rife with corruption.

SNTE's top leaders have authority over curricula, as well as the discipline, hiring and evaluation of teachers. Principals take a cut of sales of snacks and bottled water sold in the schools, and in some states, the union sells teacher positions to the highest bidders, according to the film.

On average a Mexican receives eight years of schooling compared with about 13 years in the USA and Canada, the film says. Sixty-seven percent of school directors say teacher absenteeism is a chronic issue. Government oversight of the union-run system is so lax, the film says, that the Public Education Secretariat could not say how many teachers Mexico has.

Political analyst Denise Dresser, professor at the Autonomous Technological Institute of Mexico, says, "We are so badly educated, we don't know how badly educated we are."

SNTE has about 1.4 million dues-paying members, making it the most powerful union in Mexico. SNTE boss Elba Esther Gordillo called de Panzazo! an unfair attack on her union.

"I don't accept that (Mexican schools are) a failure," Gordillo told the Spanish newspaper El Pais. "The Mexican school system has fulfilled its duty for the 20th century. We have to recognize its success."

Education and politics

Calderón says an unknown number of teachers work not in classrooms but on union and political matters for Gordillo, who has won the subservience of the government by lending out her staff to work for political parties.

"There's been cowardice on the part of the Mexican government because it's ceded the domain of education to the union," he says.

The SNTE supported the election of President Felipe Calderón in 2006, and Gordillo's son-in-law, Fernando González, was appointed undersecretary for basic education.

The Calderón administration points out that it brokered a deal with the SNTE for teacher evaluations and initiated measures to reduce the practice of teachers selling and bequeathing their jobs upon retirement for up to 100,000 pesos ($7,900).

Other proposed changes have been beaten back by the union, which has staged violent protests against ideas such as teacher evaluations. Union influence extends to the curriculum, which is heavy on national myths propagated by a federal government that was dominated by one political party for decades.

"In Mexican public schools, they teach resignation and, above all, to be someone who depends on the state," says Ilán Semo, political historian at the Iberoamerican University in Mexico City.

Semo says not all union members are to blame for the decline in education.

"Just because (the union's) political doesn't mean that they're bad educators," he says.

Rise in private education

Private education has exploded in Mexico over the past 30 years, but its students perform almost the same on standardized tests as public school pupils — something de Panzazo! attributes to children being taught to memorize material, instead of solve problems.

Political science professor Federico Estévez of the Autonomous Technological Institute of Mexico attributes the poor performances to low teacher pay and high faculty turnover in private schools, even at the elite academies. He says parents put their kids in private schools so they will befriend classmates from elite political and business families.

Calderón of Mexicanos Primero says he hopes parents and politicians will stand up to SNTE and make changes.

"It's politically costly to act in favor of children," he says. "We want it to be costly not to act."

Education system holding Mexico back, critics say