“Professional merit must be the only way to be hired, remain and advance as a teacher,” President Enrique Peña Nieto said upon signing major education reforms into law on Monday.
For decades, Elba Esther Gordillo had controlled access to the profession, allowing teachers to sell or pass on their positions. This practice enabled thousands of people who no longer work as teachers to remain on the payroll, including, in one infamous case, Servando Gomez Martinez, a co-founder of the Familia Michoacana and Knights Templar cartels.
The new legislation will introduce a standardized process for the hiring, evaluating, promoting and retaining of teachers, as well as establishing a census to determine the exact number of schools, teachers and pupils in the country. The reforms also aim to raise the proportion of students who complete secondary school to 80 percent and the number who complete high school (prepatoria) to 40 percent.Having been agreed upon by Mexico’s main political parties, the reforms were passed by the Chamber of Deputies in December and were later ratified by the Senate and over half of the country’s state congresses.