Despite Police Repression, Mexico's Militant Teachers Union Continues to Strike and Protest Andalusia Knoll Soloff - In These Times
go to original August 7, 2016

Members of MORENA march in support of CNTE union and their demand against President Enrique Peña Nieto's education reform in Mexico City. (teleSUR)

On July 5, teachers at hundreds of schools in Mexico City went on strike to demand the repeal of sweeping U.S.-style “education reforms” that they say undermine labor rights and compromise children’s educations. Thousands of students and parents also took to the streets, where protesters erected blockades.

Support for the teachers’ cause has ballooned in the wake of a violent police crackdown on teachers blockading a highway in Nochixtlán, Oaxaca, on June 19. Gunfire - at least some of it from the Mexican police - killed at least eight people and injured dozens more.

“Parents are now getting involved because they realize this isn’t just about the teachers, it’s about the future of their children,” said Cristian Alfonso Tovar, an elementary school principal in Mexico City who is active in the National Coordinator of Education Workers (CNTE), Mexico’s activist teachers’ union, which is driving the protests.

Introduced by Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto in 2013, the education reforms include controversial new evaluation standards requiring teachers to pass an exam proving their qualifications. After three failures, they are removed from the classroom. Teachers contend an exam cannot properly assess teaching skill and that the test’s real purpose is to erode job security. The legislation also suggests that parents’ organizations make “voluntary” contributions of money, goods and services to their children’s schools, which some believe is a path to privatization. Teachers say these measures ignore the primary factors hindering education: inadequate public funding, which starves classrooms of resources, and the widespread poverty that prevents many children from even attending school, as their families need them to work. They accuse the government of trying to shift blame for its failures to teachers and parents.

The reforms, supported by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, an association of wealthy nations that includes the United States, and by private think tanks like Mexicanos Primero (Mexicans First), are reminiscent of those that have been imposed in the past decade in the United States over the objections of U.S. teachers’ unions.

But ideology isn’t the only thing that’s been imported across the border. Since 2008, Congress has appropriated $2.3 billion for Mexican police forces to combat organized crime. Human rights organizations, including Human Rights Watch, say the Merida Initiative, which has funded helicopters, police dogs and training programs for thousands of Mexican police officers, has enabled intensifying repression of civil society by the state.

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