For those of you who have not yet heard about what has been happening recently in our neighboring country Mexico, a protest surrounding the country’s new US inspired, test-based reforms to improve teacher quality, as based on teachers’ own test performance, as been ongoing since last weekend. Teachers are to pass tests themselves, this time, and if they cannot pass the tests after three attempts, they are to be terminated/replaced (i.e., three strikes, they are to be out). The strikes are occurring primarily in Oaxaca, southern Mexico, and they have thus far led to nine deaths, including the death of one journalist, upwards of 100 injuries, approximately 20 arrests, and the “en masse” termination of many teachers for striking.
As per an article available here, “a massive strike organized by a radical wing of the country’s largest teachers union [the National Coordinator of Education Workers (or CNTE)] turned into a violent confrontation with police” starting last weekend. In Mexico, as it has been in our country’s decade’s past, the current but now prevailing assumption is that the nation’s “failing” education system is the fault of teachers who, as many argue, are those to be directly (and perhaps solely) blamed for their students’ poor relative performance. They are also to be blamed for not “causing” student performance throughout Mexico to improve.
Hence, Mexico is to hold teachers more accountable for what which they do, or more arguably that which they are purportedly not doing or doing well, and this is the necessary action being pushed by Mexico’s President Enrique Peña Nieto. Teacher-level standardized tests are to be used to measure teachers’ competency, instructional approaches, etc., teacher performance reviews are to be used as well, and those who fail to measurably perform are to be let go. Thereafter, the country’s educational situation is to, naturally, improve. This, so goes the perpetual logic. Although this is “an evaluation system that’s completely without precedent in the history of Mexican education.” See also here about how this logic is impacting other countries across the world, as per the Global Education Reform Movement (GERM).
“Here is a viral video (in Spanish) of a teacher explaining why the mandatory tests are so unwelcome: because Mexico is a huge, diverse country (sound familiar?) and you can’t hold teachers in the capital to the same standards as, say, those in the remote mountains of Chiapas. (He also says, to much audience approval, that Peña Nieto, who has the reputation of a lightweight, probably wouldn’t be able to meet the standards he’s imposing on teachers himself.)…And it’s true that some of the teachers in rural areas might not have the same academic qualifications—particularly in a place like Oaxaca, which for all its tourist delights of its capital is one of Mexico’s poorest states, with a large indigenous population and substandard infrastructure.”
Teachers in other Mexican cities are beginning to mobilize, in solidarity, although officially still at this point, these new educational policies are “not subject to negotiation.”
