Mexico's Failing Schools Spell Trouble for Ruling Party William Booth - The Washington Post
go to original June 10, 2012

Josefina Vazquez Mota, Mexican presidential candidate for the National Action Party (PAN), takes part in a rally in Guadalajara, Mexico. (Hector Guerrero/AFP/Getty Images)

MEXICO CITY - When he was elected president six years ago, Felipe Calderon appointed a bright and energetic political operator to fix the country’s wreck of a public education system, where teachers buy and sell their jobs and half the children drop out after junior high.

That politician was Josefina Vazquez Mota, who served as his loyal minister of education for 27 months — before she was sacrificed by Calderon in an act of political expediency and crushed by her nemesis, Elba Esther Gordillo, the “president for life” of the national teachers union, one of the largest labor organizations in the world.

Vazquez Mota is running in the July 1 presidential election as the standard-bearer of Calderon’s ruling party, the first viable female candidate in Mexico’s modern history. But she is trailing, slipping to third place, according to the latest polls, still trying to convince voters that she and her center-right party will deliver real change.

Far removed from the media spotlight on the violence of the U.S.-backed war against the drug cartels here, the struggles of Calderon and Vazquez Mota to transform the nation’s public education system show how a vision of a more modern Mexico continues to clash with an old Mexico beset by charges of corruption and cronyism.

In the past few days, teachers have been accused of stealing copies of a national exam in an effort to boost student scores. And teachers refusing to take exams to prove their basic competency abandoned their schools in protest, while Calderon proclaimed that “enough is enough” and pleaded with them to get back in the classroom.

At risk of failure

“The education system is in deep crisis and is at risk of complete failure,” said David Calderon, no relation to the president, leader of a reform group called Mexicanos Primero, or Mexicans First, which produced a documentary that was a box office hit about the sad state of the schools called “De Panzazo,” slang for “barely passing.”

By most measures, Mexico’s education system is an underachiever. The country is a member of the Group of 20 and boasts of the world’s 14th-largest economy, but only a quarter of its children graduate from high school. Sixth-graders in Mexico get 562 hours of “instructional learning” a year. In South Korea, it’s 1,195 hours, according to Mexicans First.

The country’s bad schools have pushed millions of poorly educated migrants to make their way illegally to the United States to seek jobs and opportunity. Mexico’s growing middle class is abandoning the public schools in droves, paying high tuitions for private academies.

While test scores have inched up a few points in the past decade, Mexico is still bumping along the bottom among the member states of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a club of industrial nations. In the latest international exams, more than half of Mexican 15-year-olds scored at the lower levels in math and did only a bit better in reading and reasoning.

‘A very corrupt system’

Yet Mexico’s lame performance is not about money. A generous 20 percent of the country’s budget goes to education, about $30 billion a year. More than 90 percent goes to salaries - negotiated by the teachers union, which dictates policy.

“It was - and sadly still is - a very corrupt system,” said Carlos Ornelos, a specialist in education at the Autonomous Metropolitan University who was one of the first, in the 1990s, to expose the practice of teachers buying and selling their jobs.

An elementary school teaching post, a tenured position for life, still sells for as much as $20,000 in the resort city of Cancun, and a post in a rural village can be had for $2,000, Ornelas said.

Although the marketplace is now more discreet, the practice purportedly continues. The group Mexicans First estimates that 40 percent of the teaching jobs are still sold, or inherited, or exchanged for political or even sexual favors.

Read the full story at The Washington Post

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