The Education System in Mexico Education the System

THE SYSTEM EDUCATION IN MEXICO Over the last three decades, a significant amount of research has sought to relate educational institutions, policies, practices and reforms to social structures and agencies. A number of models have been developed that have become the basis for attempting to understand the complex relationship between education and society. At the same time, national and international bodies tasked with improving educational performances seem to be writing in a void, in that there is no rigorous theory guiding their work, and their documents exhibit few THE references to groups, institutions and forces that can impede or promote their programmes and projects. As a result, the recommendations these bodies provide to their clients display little to no comprehension of how and under what conditions the recommendations can be put into effect. The Education System in Mexico directly addresses this problem. By combining abstract EDUCATION insights with the practicalities of educational reforms, policies, practices and their social antecedents, it offers a long overdue reflection of the history, effects and significance of the Mexican educational system, as well as presenting a more cogent understanding of the relationship between educational institutions and social forces in Mexico and around the SYSTEM world. David Scott is Professor of Curriculum, Pedagogy and Assessment at UCL, Institute of Education. Chris Martin amd Elsa Guzman David Scott, C.M. Posner IN C. M. Posner is a Visiting Fellow at UCL, Institute of Education and founding director of the Instituto de Investigación Educativo de Nayarit (México). Chris Martin is a Visiting Fellow at UCL, Institute of Education and a consultant on MEXICO education reform programmes with the Ministry of Education in Mexico. Elsa Guzman is a member of the Institute of Adult Education in Mexico. David Scott C.M. Posner Chris Martin Elsa Guzman Cover image: © DIOMEDIA / SuperStock RF / Don Paulson Photography Free open access versions available from Cover design: www.ucl.ac.uk/ucl-press www.ironicitalics.com The Education System in Mexico The Education System in Mexico David Scott, C. M. Posner, Chris Martin and Elsa Guzman First published in 2018 by UCL Press University College London Gower Street London WC1E 6BT Available to download free: www.ucl.ac.uk/ ucl- press Text © Authors, 2018 The authors have asserted their rights under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as authors of this work. A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from The British Library. This book is published under a Creative Commons 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0). This license allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the work; to adapt the work and to make commercial use of the work providing attribution is made to the authors (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Attribution should include the following information: Scott D, Posner C.M., Martin C and Guzman E. 2018. The Education System in Mexico. London: UCL Press. DOI: https:// doi.org/ 10.14324/ 111.9781787350724 Further details about Creative Commons licenses are available at http:// creativecommons.org/ licenses/ ISBN: 978– 1– 78735– 077– 9 (Hbk.) ISBN: 978– 1– 78735– 076– 2 (Pbk.) ISBN: 978– 1– 78735– 072– 4 (PDF) ISBN: 978– 1– 78735– 073– 1 (epub) ISBN: 978– 1– 78735– 074– 8 (mobi) ISBN: 978– 1– 78735– 075– 5 (html) DOI: https:// doi.org/ 10.14324/ 111.9781787350724 Preface In 2013, the Mexican Secretary for Public Education, Emilio Chuayffet, visited the Institute of Education, University of London, to discuss his reforms to the education system in Mexico. He was at this time respon- sible for all matters concerning education in his country, supported by the Mexican Secretariat of Public Education (Secretaría de Educación Pública, SEP). In particular, he wanted to talk about the recent introduction of a national standard for reading ability that was subsequently rolled out across the system. This was that all children within the state system were to be assessed on the number of words they could read aloud in the classroom in one minute. The number of words was to be increased from one grade to the next. This was devised as a measure to raise standards in the system. In response, we quietly suggested that reading skills could not be measured in this way, that this would lead to a distortion of the reading process and that almost certainly more children would develop a lifelong aversion to reading. Unfortunately, our protestations had little effect and the scheme was introduced in Mexican schools with the results that we had anticipated and warned about. This is an example of a standards and accountability approach that now holds sway in most parts of the world, and in particular in Mexico and is enthusiastically endorsed by international bodies, such as the World Bank and the Organisation for Economic Co- operation and Development (OECD). This book is a result of a long immersion in the country by three of the four authors. More formally, it has emerged from our work, funded by the Mexican Government, to identify a set of standards in Literacy, Numeracy and Science/ Technology, to develop systems and procedures for ensuring the implementation and sustainability of these standards mechanisms, and to contribute to more effective schooling and a better trained and educated workforce in Mexico. The project attempted to provide answers to the following questions: What are appropriate standards in Literacy, Numeracy and Science/ Technology at different age and ability levels for Mexico? What are appropriate contents, progressions, v skills/ dispositions and formative and summative assessment arrangements in the domains of Literacy, Numeracy and Science/Technology, for the Mexican education system? Which external and internal school arrangements are best suited for their implementation? What is the most appropriate way to sustain these reforms (new curriculum standards in Literacy, Numeracy and Science/ Technology and the arrangements for their implementation and use)? (See also Scott et al., 2012) During this process, we encountered all the familiar difficulties of conducting any research project in any part of the world, and in add- ition, we encountered two particularly Mexican issues. The first we can briefly describe here as the repeated failures of the Mexican government to implement meaningful and sustainable system-wide reforms of educational institutions. (We examine this issue in much greater detail in the book.) The second issue is the way all discussions in Mexico about education are politicized and, as a result and more so than in many other coun- tries round the world, emptied of significance. This is the background to our writing this book, which we hope makes a contribution to a better understanding of educational institutions in Mexico and consequently better practices within the system. David Scott C. M. Posner Chris Martin Elsa Guzman 25 June 2017 vi PREFACE newgenprepdf Contents 1. Introduction and a Brief History of the Mexican Education System 1 2. Reforming the System: Successes and Failures 20 3. Curriculum, Pedagogic and Assessment Reforms in the Mexican System 51 4. Pre- Service and In- Service Training in Mexico 74 5. Parents and the Mexican Education System 94 6. Intercultural Education and Alternative Education Programmes 112 7. Systems and System Reforms 136 References 162 Index 169 vii 1 Introduction and a Brief History of the Mexican Education System It is customary to speak of a group of schools as a system and indeed there is a great deal of sense in this for the reasons we explain further on. However, describing education as a system risks ignoring the core of that activity, namely, that it is a series of profoundly personal acts of learning. Thus, from the outset, any consideration of the Mexican education system also needs to take into account the tension between the drive to learn and the systematic attempt to organize and control it. The root of this tension lies in the difference between the basic demand for access to learning opportunities for the satisfaction of needs (emotional, spiritual, material and intellectual) and the control and selection processes that education systems undertake. Comparative educationalists have traditionally studied national education systems, with a notion of comparison between systems or within individual systems being the dominant methodological device. The field was first developed in the early nineteenth century in paral- lel with the rise of national education systems, and it took the national system as its main object of enquiry (Noah and Eckstein, 1969). Some have argued that this approach is now redundant, since nation states are declining and national systems are consequently becoming obso- lete (Reich, 2015). Indeed, the very idea of a system is anachronistic in a world of global markets, multinational, transnational or even stateless corporations and cross- national comparative systems of evaluation and control. The thrust of our argument in this book is that nation states and national systems of education are far from redundant and even in single nation studies comparison still has a role to play. Education systems change over time and they experience altera- tions to both their internal and external structures and relations. 1 Whether change occurs or not depends on the capacity within the system as well as the condition of the change- catalyst or set of reforms. These are structured in particular ways, and this determines their ability to act as change- agents. Certain types of catalyst are more likely to induce change in a system than others; for example, changes of personnel (caused nat- urally through retirements and deaths or by people in powerful positions within the system exercising their authority), new policies, events in nature, external interventions, new arrays of resources, new arrangements of roles and functions within a system, new financial settlements and so forth.

Load more