President Enrique Peña Nieto unveiled a wide-ranging reform package this week that seeks to mend Mexico’s broken education system while limiting the power of the Teacher’s Union (SNTE) and its dominant leader Elba Esther Gordillo.
A key part of the reform bill will be the creation of an autonomous institute (the Instituto Nacional para la Evaluacion de la Educacion) to oversee the evaluation of teachers in Mexico. The institute will also be responsible for ensuring that teachers have the resources at their disposal to maintain the standards required in their work.
Gordillo has been blamed for blocking previous attempts to evaluate teachers’ performance and permit promotion based on merit rather than cronyism or length of service.
Significantly, Monday’s presentation of the bill was the first time in 23 years that Gordillo had not been invited to attend the launch of a major government education initiative.
While senior SNTE officials played down the possibility of a confrontation with the federal government over the legislation, Gordillo did not make any comment.
The appointment of Emilio Chuayffet as Peña Nieto’s Education Secretary is a clear sign that he is prepared to do battle with Gordillo, who has never clearly explained how she has amassed a small fortune while serving as a teacher and union boss.
As a federal legislator with the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), Chuayffet was instrumental in alienating Gordillo from the party mainstream. Her response was to form the New Alliance Party in 2005, which gained less than two percent of the vote in July’s general election.
Analysts have compared Peña Nieto’s “strike” against Gordillo with a similar blow by President Carlos Salinas de Gortari (a mentor of the current president) against powerful Pemex union boss Joaquin Hernandez Galicia in 1989.
In that instance, Hernandez was arrested, accused of homicide and sentenced to 35 years in prison. He was pardoned in 1997.
While it’s unlikely Peña Nieto will take such dramatic action to curb the excesses of Gordillo, this week’s initiative could go a long way to assuaging the doubts of critics who believe he does not have the stomach for a prolonged fight with unionized labor.
Professional teaching
Peña Nieto submitted the legislation to Congress a week after signing a pact with opposition parties designed to increase economic growth, employment and competitiveness. The leaders of the conservative National Action Party (PAN) and the leftist Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), who signed the Pacto por Mexico, have given their backing to the education bill.
Speaking at Monday’s ceremony held at the Anthropology Museum in Mexico City, PAN President Gustavo Madero said the new rules will spur the professionalization of teaching based on merit and academic ability rather than inheritance, obligations or trade-offs.
PRD President Jesus Zambrano said the reforms are “an important first step” in the “recovery” of Mexico’s educational system from “a mafia that has owned it for decades.”
The legislation also specifies new conditions for teacher recruitment and calls for the setting up of a register of all schools and teachers in Mexico in a bid to eliminate corrupt payments to “phantom” professors who never give classes and eradicate the practice – condoned by the SNTE – of retiring teachers “passing on” their jobs to relatives or even selling them to the highest bidder.
The reforms also seeks to give more independence to school directors and parents to administer their campuses in accord with their own specific needs.
Education Secretary Emilio Chuayffet said over the next six years 40,000 schools in Mexico would be turned into “full-time” with six to eight hours of classes each day.
After admitting that many previous reforms to the educational system had simply consisted of “remedial measures,” Chuayffet said the proposed legislation was “not a catalog of good intentions” but “commitments subject to permanent public scrutiny.”