Thread: In effort to create better jobs, Mexico tackles school syste

In effort to create better jobs, Mexico tackles school system

103 commentsby Chris Hawley - Apr. 28, 2008 12:00 AM
Republic Mexico City Bureau

MEXICO CITY - In an elementary school emptied of kids for the weekend, a dozen Mexican math teachers sat at tables and puzzled over a problem with no easy answers.

The immediate task: finding a creative way to teach square roots. But the bigger challenge - improving Mexican students' dismal performance - loomed large in the classroom.

"We need new ways of getting through to the students," said teacher Cesar Rangel Flores as he took a break from the training session for teachers. "We need more freedom over curriculum, more resources, more hours in class."

With high dropout rates and bad test scores, the poor quality of Mexico's public education has become a growing concern as Mexico embarks on a new push to modernize and create better-paying jobs that could slow the flow of migrants to the United States. On April 14, President Felipe Calderón called for a major overhaul of Mexico's school system.

"We need a reform that gives Mexico the right conditions to educate its students," Calderón said in a speech attended by governors, parents and the head of the powerful teachers union. "An agreement that will bring the quality that the country needs to face the new demands of a globalized world."

As part of the proposed changes, for the first time Mexican high-school seniors took a national test last week to help pinpoint schools' weak points.

Along the U.S.-Mexican border, the shortcomings of Mexico's schools prompt many Mexican families to enroll their children in U.S. schools.

They are also a major reason Mexican migrants bring their children to the United States, even though statistics show those children struggle once they arrive. Nearly 23 percent of all Mexican-born teenagers drop out of U.S. high schools, the highest of any nationality, according to a 2005 study by the Pew Hispanic Center.

Over the long term, the deficiencies of Mexico's schools could have serious consequences for the United States, said George Grayson, an expert on Mexico at the College of William & Mary. Poorly educated immigrants take longer to assimilate and lack the skills that U.S. companies need to compete, he said.

But at the recent training session in Mexico City, many educators said change will be difficult. "It's not just the quality of the schools, it's the economy," said Susan EspÃ*n, a sixth-grade teacher. "Out in the countryside, attendance is poor because the kids have to work to support their families. In the suburbs, you have 40 or 50 kids in each class because the population growth is so intense."


Shorter days

It was early afternoon, and 312 students at the Estado de Mexico Primary School in the Mexico City suburb of Tultitlan were just beginning their school day. Some had been working all morning at their families' businesses, Principal Juan Humberto BenÃ*tez said.

"How many kilos of tomatoes do you sell in a day?" he asked 11-year-old Pedro Miguel MartÃ*nez, who works in his family's vegetable distributing company.

"About 120 kilos," MartÃ*nez said immediately. BenÃ*tez chuckled. "The ones who work, they're really good with numbers," he said.

Like at many Mexican schools, there is a morning shift and an afternoon shift, each about five hours long, compared with the seven or eight hours that American students spend in school. There is no lunch served, but children get a free box of strawberry-flavored milk and snacks.

Mexican law requires children to attend school through middle school, the equivalent of ninth grade in the United States. But the government spends one-seventh what U.S. schools spend per student: $1,522 a year, compared with $10,071.

"We don't have the things that they have in the United States that allow the students to spend all day at school: the playing fields, the cafeterias, the showers, the specialized attention," said Ismael Vidales, a researcher at Mexico's Center for Advanced Studies and Research in Pedagogy.

The school system is extremely centralized. Eighty percent of school funding comes from the federal government. Teachers must follow the same national curriculum, and every elementary- and middle-school student uses the same textbooks published by the government.

Students must take a test to enter high school and are assigned a school according to their grade on the test.


Poor grades

Only 47 percent of students who enter vocational high schools graduate, according to Mexico's National Institute of Statistics, Geography and Information Processing. In college-prep high schools, the graduation rate is 60 percent. In the United States, 75 percent of all high-school students graduate.

In December, the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development published the results of the PISA, a test it gives every three years in schools around the world. Of the 30 OECD countries, Mexico came in last place in science, math and reading.

The problems are partly due to Mexico's economy, said Eduardo Andere, author of two books about Mexico's school system.

While the average income in Mexico has risen from $3,084 a year in 1997 to $8,190 in 2007, southern and central Mexico have advanced much more slowly than the heavily industrialized north.

In the isolated towns of Oaxaca, Chiapas and Guerrero states, families struggle to buy pencils and notebooks for their children and students spend long hours working on the farm. Teachers are usually young and inexperienced because veterans soon tire of the exhausting commute on perilous mountain roads.


Labor trouble

There is another obstacle to educational progress, Grayson said: Mexico's powerful National Education Workers Union, or SNTE.

In June 2006, disgruntled teachers ignited a national crisis in Mexico. When police tried to break up a union protest demanding higher wages outside the state capitol in the city of Oaxaca, teachers and their sympathizers stormed government offices, chased out the governor and forced the police to flee the city.

They barricaded the downtown with burning vehicles, seized control of local television and radio stations and beat up government employees who tried to continue working. After five months of anarchy and the death of an American journalist, then-President Vicente Fox sent in thousands of riot police to retake the city of 258,000 people.

The teachers' strike showed the power and volatile nature of the teachers union, one of Latin America's biggest with 1.5 million members. Unlike in the United States, where teacher strikes are a mostly local affair, labor strife in Mexico affects entire states at once.

The union has its own political party, the New Alliance, which controls nine seats in Congress. SNTE leader Elba Esther Gordillo's last-minute order for teachers to split their votes instead of voting a straight ticket helped Calderón win the 2006 presidential election.

The SNTE controls the plazas, or tenured positions, within schools. Tenured teachers are nearly impossible to fire for anything except a criminal offense, Vidales said. The positions are often handed down through families or even sold.

In 2007, at least 9,000 teachers continued to collect school paychecks even though they were on leave to work for the union or politicians, an investigation by El Universal newspaper showed in February.

"The (union officials) criticize but don't offer solutions," said Monica Castro, director of the Ramiro Reyes Esparza Teacher Training Center in Mexico City. "They do nothing to help with training or standards."

Gordillo says the criticism is undeserved, noting that the union helped created the Carrera Magisterial, or Teaching Career program, one of the world's first merit-based pay systems for teachers, in the early 1990s.

"Not only is the National Education Workers Union not an obstacle, as some say out of ignorance or bad faith, but it is also a protagonist in educational change," she said in an April 14 speech.


Calls for change

To free up working children to attend school, the Calderón administration has promised to increase the number of grants to students' families from 4.8 million a year to 5.7 million by 2012.

It has also promised to install distance-learning equipment in every classrooms and introduce full days at 5,000 schools.

The government's Education Sector Plan, unveiled last year, also would tighten requirements for teachers, introduce new systems to monitor their performance and mandate training for teachers in schools with poor standardized-test scores.

It also calls for multiyear financial planning, an apparent attempt to get the SNTE to sign multiyear contracts, which the union has resisted.

It also proposes greater participation by private companies and social organizations. Whether the changes will work depends a lot on Mexico's economy and how much money it has to spend on education, Vidales said.

"The problem is not just training teachers or bringing up test scores," Vidales said. "The challenge is bringing up Mexico in general."


Republic reporter Sergio Solache contributed to this article.


http://tinyurl.com/6cnzd8

With high dropout rates and bad test scores, the poor quality of Mexico's public education has become a growing concern as Mexico embarks on a new push to modernize and create better-paying jobs that could slow the flow of migrants to the United States. On April 14, President Felipe Calderón called for a major overhaul of Mexico's school system.

The CULTURE does not place a high priority on education.

"We don't have the things that they have in the United States that allow the students to spend all day at school: the playing fields, the cafeterias, the showers, the specialized attention," said Ismael Vidales, a researcher at Mexico's Center for Advanced Studies and Research in Pedagogy.

What do any of these things have to do with EDUCATION??? These are extracurriculars, NOT educational! No wonder the students are failing, with teachers like this one!

With the top grade in Mexico being just the 9th grade I know where both countries can find a great set of tutors.



When the advocates of amnesty for the illegal aliens students use arguments for DREAM I hear why they should go back.

We have paid the cost for their education as far as the 12th grade. A tremendous advantage if they live where education is not as high.

Some of the illegal alien students have done here well academically.

To me we have given them a gift it is time to give back by going home bound to Mexico.


The Best Marshall Plan America could have for the Third World is strict policy of immigration enforcement.