Giant Billboard Drives Home Extent of Corruption as Mexico Schools Suffer Damien Cave - The New York Times
go to original September 2, 2014

Above a busy intersection, a tally of funds wasted since the first day of school last month. (Adriana Zehbrauskas/The New York Times)

MEXICO CITY — All over Mexico, children have begun making their way to school for the start of a new year — many stepping into run-down buildings without running water, new textbooks or trained teachers.

Spending is not the issue. Mexico budgets more for education, as a proportion of gross domestic product, than Brazil, Spain and even Switzerland. So where does the money go?

According to one calculation now appearing on a new “abuse meter” — a giant electronic billboard hovering over a busy intersection here in the capital — about $2.8 billion annually goes into the pockets of 298,174 no-show teachers and administrators who collect pay without working.

“It’s the robbery of the century, and it’s every year,” said Claudio X. González Guajardo, president of Mexicanos Primero, an educational advocacy organization responsible for the abuse meter. “The corruption is massive.”

Mr. González, an erudite critic with a professorial air, has been condemning educational waste for a long time, with a range of evidence. Data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development has long identified Mexico as an educational underperformer, with 93.3 percent of its education budget spent on staffing — more than any other member country in the organization — even as basic school needs go unmet.

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