NN37, May 2006
Special Theme on Education and Training out of Poverty? A Status Report
PROGRESS TOWARDS EFA: LESSONS FROM THE MEXICAN EXPERIENCE
By Chris Martin, Ford Foundation, Mexico City
Progress towards EFA: Lessons from the Mexican experienceA huge contrast exists between the growing economic power of Mexico, now within the top ten largest economies and, with Brazil, a Latin American leader, and the persistence of poverty among a large section of the population. In educational terms, Mexico has a poor record, trailing behind not only countries of similar levels of development but many of its less fortunate neighbours according to recent international evaluations including those of OECD-PISA. Mexico?s disappointing progress towards UNESCO?s EFA goals has wider implications. Mexico stands as a classic case of a country committed both to reaching the UNESCO EFA and to following the reform recommendations of international agencies to attain them.
The Mexican educational reform was launched in the early 1990s to attack long-standing backwardness in school enrolment, promotion and scholastic achievement. It was supported by the World Bank to modernize and decentralize the administration, update the curriculum, professionalize the teaching force and involve parents in the educational process. More than a decade on, most scholars consider that the reforms have failed to bring about significant educational improvement and that the structural obstacles to it succeeding remain.
Why is this so? To a great extent factors outside the school system are to blame, principally, poverty, inequality, discrimination against the poor and ethnic minorities. These factors are reflected in the deficient quality of services that reach such populations. Currently 40 million people, well over a third of the national population live below the poverty line in this highly endowed and relatively developed nation. All this points to profound shortcomings in the whole of Mexico?s economic and social policy.
Within the educational sphere, a broad consensus in the scholarly community consider that whilst necessary, the reforms have been excessively managerialist, top-down and with very little attention to educational substance and pedagogy. As such they have fallen wide of the mark: the stifling administrative centralism endemic to educational governance, the deep-rooted cronyism especially in the massive teamster-like teachers union and the intricacies of school level reality, which needs more independence not a new raft of bureaucratic impositions. Yet in spite of rhetoric and some provisions for granting more school autonomy, it is the proliferation of complex and not always coherent bureaucratic instruments of control that has followed the reform. This reflects the conviction of policy-makers that more regulation ensures more efficient and open administration of educational delivery.
However, while the unwritten, closed shop practices of educational administration persist, the mass of tortuous bureaucratic controls offers a truly mesmerizing range of instruments to subvert the technical rationale of the reform intentions in favour of local educational politics. Apparently transparent means of promotion, for example, enter the province of favour giving and exchanging. Teachers caught between these procedures and their consciences, their commitment to their students, often withdraw behind walls of silence and apparent conformity freezing up the real opportunities for educational improvement.
In Mexico and more generally in Latin America, the failure of top-down reform has generated alternative proposals for educational improvement. Many of these centre around local groups of teachers, usually with the support of parents and NGOs, to innovate with curriculum, teaching methods and participative school government to provide a more up-to-date and locally responsive education. In Mexico this has been occurring typically on the fringes of the system, where there are fewer resources, more needs but less control too. The successes, of ten scholastic achievement improvements of some of these practices, suggest the value of taking seriously bottom up rather than top down reform or at least dialogically generated change as an alternative to the business models developed thus far. At any rate, future reforms need to learn to listen or once again their performance, like that of the students affected by it, will fall well short of EFA targets.