Politics: Wither the Education Reform?
The sweeping changes to education laws that constituted the first in a series of structural reforms passed during the first half of President Enrique Peña’s administration introduced major changes into the entire system, beginning with a constitutional guarantee that all Mexicans have a right to a quality education, the introduction of a nationwide evaluation system overseen by an autonomous institute as well as a merit-based system for determining any hiring, job placement and promotion decisions while stripping union organizations of much of the control they exerted over the public education system. Moreover, a centralized federal system was established to handle teacher payrolls, whose prior management on the state level had further bolstered union power over public education.
The motivations for the reform included recognition that the system continued to be plagued by problems of quality and equity, with schools in rural and indigenous areas poorly equipped and assigned some of the least qualified instructors. As a result, the educational system helps to reproduce and accentuate social inequality instead of serving as an instrument providing equal opportunities through which people can aspire to improve their standards of living.
But the reform was intensely opposed by the CNTE, a dissident faction of the national teachers' union (SNTE) and increasingly by many other sections of the union. In his campaign, President-elect Andres Manuel López Obrador embraced those positions; just this past week he announced that the reform would be “canceled”, and his future education minister announced three days of forums this week to define a new “National Education Agreement”. It is not yet clear just how far the next administration intends to go to uproot the reform, what it will propose in its place, and to what extent it might attempt to install a new union leadership to its liking in the hopes that the SNTE could assume on his behalf the role it played under past administrations as a major prop of political support. But the administration's options on all of those fronts could prove to be fraught with political and policy risks of major proportions, and most troublingly, could jeopardize years of efforts to qualitatively improve the public education system in Mexico.
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