A resounding NO to the PRI's education reform

President Peña Nieto’s education reform bill, passed in December 2012, amends the Constitution. In February 2013, the day after the law was promulgated, President Peña Nieto ordered the arrest of Elba Esther Gordillo, the teachers’ union leader, not for her corruption but because she was a hindrance to implementation of the reform. But massive protests by independent teachers across the country are proving to be a greater obstacle to implementing this elitist privatizing reform.

Jorge Alonso

Most primary and secondary education teachers in Mexico belong to the National Education Workers’ Union (SNTE), which is the largest union not only in Mexico but in all Latin America. The Ministry of Education estimates the union has 1.2 million members.

Corrupt despotic control

In the 1950s the SNTE was corporatized and integrated as a fundamental part of the governing party, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). Ever since, SNTE leaders have been called “charros” (cowboys), which is Mexican slang for union leaders imposed by the government. As primary education spread through the country, having the teachers’ organization depend on the governing party was crucial for organizing elections and ensuring the fraudulent tactics that characterized them, keeping the PRI in office for an unbroken 70 years.

The SNTE has also harbored teachers who have struggled for union independence. In the 1980s they grouped into the National Coordinator of Education Workers (CNTE). From 1972 to 1989 Carlos Jonguitud Barrios led the SNTE, acting as a kind of despot. Once he was no longer useful to the neoliberal modernization that President Carlos Salinas imposed on the country—and that teachers strongly demonstrated their dissatisfaction with—the government removed him from office and put Elba Esther Gordillo, a teacher, in his place. She finessed the tyrannical and corrupt control of her predecessor, who had promoted her ascent in positions within the union structure.

There’s no transparency in reporting the amount of union fees collected, but based on the fact that Mexico’s teachers pay 1% of their salary to the union, inferential estimates have been made that the SNTE receives 1.44 billion pesos a year (about US$111 million) from membership fees alone. To this must be added millions of pesos from state governors and several million more in federal funds through various programs. Gordillo controlled all this money for years, triangulating it to amass a huge personal fortune.

The rise of Elba Esther Gordillo

Soon she wasn’t content with arbitrarily handling the union; she also used it to obtain political positions. She became a representative then a senator, headed up a Federal District delegation and directed a grassroots sector of the PRI.

Gordillo was the PRI General Secretary when that party finally lost the presidential election in 2000 to National Action Party (PAN) candidate Vicente Fox so she quickly made friends with Fox’s wife. Although the law prohibited the registration of any union party, she managed to found a teacher-based political party for her family and friends, controlling its resources.

Gordillo supported PAN candidate Felipe Calderón in the 2006 federal elections and put pressure on PRI governors to electorally back and manipulate his strongly questioned election. The alliance with PAN worked well for her, as one of her sons-in-law was made under secretary for basic education and friends were put in charge of important state offices

The SNTE made Gordillo its president for life in 2007 and gave her the power to appoint sectional general secretaries.
With the huge resources of the teachers’ union she supported electoral candidates in every part of the country and furthermore flaunted an expensive lifestyle filled with luxuries.

And the fall of Elba Esther Gordillo

Gordillo believed herself personally untouchable and saw her union in the same way because politicians who owed her many favors and whom she had supported with money always came to her defense. But she had also made many enemies in her career and aggravated a lot of PRI supporters. When the PRI’s presidential candidate Peña Nieto wanted to make an alliance with the New Alliance Party (PANAL)—which she controlled—to finance his heavily media-backed election, strong opposition in the PRI prevented it. She overestimated her closeness to Peña Nieto and expected dividends in the distribution of Ministry of Education posts. Nonetheless, with the PRI’s return to the presidency in 2012 she lost everything PAN had given her. She was left only with the party she ran like a family and with the union’s reserves.

Back in power, the PRI calculated that its plans for education reform couldn’t go forward with Gordillo leading the teachers’ union so, within the first 100 days of the new government, she was arrested and imprisoned. Peña Nieto’s government warned her clique of followers that it had complete files on each of them so if they came out on the streets to protest her arrest, they would land in jail too. The once-powerful union leader was abandoned, which put an end to her shenanigans.

“Wuthering Heights”

The writer and education specialist Luis Hernández has described this episode as “a Mexican Wuthering Heights” since the relationship between the teacher and President Peña Nieto added up to stories of spite, deception, reconciliation and even betrayal.

Gordillo had already backed the neoliberal education reform plans in two six-year PAN terms, but the new President also needed to gain legitimacy by opposing her abominable reputation. Furthermore, he needed to send a warning to those who opposed these reforms. Peña defended Gordillo’s imprisonment as strictly legal, arguing that the union’s resources belonged to the members and not their leaders.

Neither for justice nor for ethics

The writer Adolfo Sánchez Rebolledo described Gordillo as a disgraceful and indefensible figure. She had forged her leadership in negotiations where the interests of the workers weren’t important, only those of the powerful, and had sold her services to the highest bidder, charging high rates with impunity and blatant corruption. She was imprisoned as a result of research that was always available to the government but was used at this time not through a desire for justice but to settle internal scores.

Bishop Raúl Vera said she was imprisoned because non-acceptance of the education reforms would have caused many problems. The government charged her more for lack of loyalty than to ethically right her immense corruption. This becomes clear when we compare Gordillo with an oil union leader who also flaunts goods and trips way about his income level, but makes a show of obedience to President Peña Nieto.

The Catholic priest Alejandro Solalinde said Gordillo’s imprisonment didn’t mean the PRI would eschew maintaining the teachers’ despotic leadership. And in fact the government replaced her as union president with Juan Díaz de la Torre, who had been her right-hand man, but it was made clear to him that he had to toe the government line. Dissident teachers criticized and opposed this new imposition and demanded that the case of the murder of one of their own, allegedly masterminded by Gordillo, be reopened.

No to the reform

Peña Nieto’s education reform goes hand in hand with neoliberal labor reform legislation put together by the PAN, which labor law specialists point out is reversing workers’ gains. Neither party wants to see democratic unions; what they want are unions that protect business and leave workers defenseless.

In January of this year the teachers’ union backed the presentation of thousands of appeals for protection against the labor reform. In that same month the federal government began an intense media campaign to “sell” the education bill. For example, the education minister declared that the State would reassume its leadership role because education is the property of society, not of a group.

In early March, once the educational reform was promulgated as law, dissident teachers organized a mass march to demand its repeal as well as the dismissal of the new unelected leader. They also announced they were considering how to sue Gordillo for the theft of union fees for 24 years.

Without an education plan

Independent analysts have pointed out that the reform contains no explicit education plan, in fact no indication of where it’s heading pedagogically or how to resolve education’s main problems. It gives no clue how to stop the enormous inequality and deficiencies in education.

They’ve stressed that it doesn’t actually reform education but is instead a disguised labor and administrative reform that affects the teaching profession. It gives teachers no role in defining the education plan but does contain mechanisms for politically controlling them, via a standardized assessment system usable for that purpose.

Massive teacher demonstrations

Late March saw huge demonstrations against the reform in various Mexican states. The teachers took over the highway to Acapulco for nine hours at the start of the Easter vacation, which forced the governor of Guerrero to begin negotiations. That resulted in an agreement to amend the education law in that state, but once Easter week was over the governor and the local congress ignored what had been agreed. In response the teachers took over the highway again and this time were repressed the police. But rather than putting an end to the movement, it only made it larger.

Oaxaca businessmen demanded that the governor take a hard line with the dissident teachers. The President declared that no amount of demonstrating would stop the education reform from being implemented and that it would mark Mexico’s course. Just as in the case of Atenco, Peña Nieto took over the reins of police repression.

The campaign is a lie
and the bill is privatizing

The dissident teachers denounced the government campaign in favor of the education reform as a lie. Although its advocates talked about respect for teachers’ rights, in reality teachers went from job stability to job uncertainty as both their income and their tenure will be totally dependent on assessment results.

The government propaganda denies that there is any desire to privatize education, but the dissidents pointed out how the reform will legalize school fees and allow the entry of private companies into schools, undermining the constitutional concept of free public education. While the government blames teachers for the low quality of education, the dissidents argue that the reform doesn’t address the socio-cultural factors that determine school life and its results, criticize the erratic policies of recent years or seriously evaluate the shortcomings of standardized testing. Nor does it examine the ravages caused by neoliberal policies in the students’ family environment.

The dissidents warned that they won’t permit the government to act on its irreversible decision to implement the legislation without compromise. They denounced the PRI’s return because it has brought with it the old, stagnant authoritarian style of presidency.

The problems with the
proposed assessment

The dissident teachers also charged that the education reform had been dictated by economic bureaus unfamiliar with Mexican reality. They emphasized that it lacks equitable assessment criteria for teachers, describing it as regressive. Francisco Bravo, general secretary of Local 9 in the Federal district, which is aligned with the CNTE, said, “We’ve always insisted that teachers don’t oppose evaluation or the idea that the best should be chosen for the teaching career, but you can’t simply disqualify everything we do in the classroom without knowing the conditions we face and our educational achievements, even if these thing aren’t reflected in standardized tests.”

Dr. John M. Ackerman, a legal expert and professor at the Institute of Legal Research of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, says it’s a “vile lie” that teachers reject assessment. What they propose is ongoing democratic, formative, systematic and comprehensive assessment. Rather elegantly he threw down the challenge that all journalists, politicians and businessmen who have launched a rabid crusade against teachers undergo an assessment like the one proposed for the dissident teachers. He suggested that many of the promoters of these hate campaigns would have difficulty passing a rigorous assessment of their performance in their own field.

A grassroots movement is born

The teachers’ protests have particularly grown in intensity in the country’s poorest states. Thousands of teachers, students, parents, community police, farmers and other citizens in Guerrero organized the Guerrero Grassroots Movement and marched to protest the education reform.

Observers reported that it was no longer like the many other teachers’ movements and that grassroots unrest was growing as never before. This movement called for the establishment of a grassroots assembly to draw up a plan of action. The government, repeating the model that reemerged last December 1 when it violently repressed the youth movement, used agents provocateurs to infiltrate the teachers’ movement demonstrations and incite events making members criminally liable.

Dissatisfaction was also being converted into organization in other states. On the legal front, the teachers’ struggle got federal judges to suspend dozens of teachers from possible dismissal based on the assessment. Lawsuits for constitutional protection were multiplying and by mid-March had reached 350,000. Three federal judges threw out 2,000 such suits culled from more 200,000 against the reform filed by teachers because a new law that went into effect on April 3 made this legal recourse inadmissible for use against constitutional reforms. Other judges, however, granted it in other suits while lawyers for the teachers whose suits had been thrown out challenged that contrary ruling. In a rally in front of the Supreme Court dissident teachers demanded that it rule on the suits for protection against the educational reform.

Education isn’t a business

Independent unions marching on May 1, International Workers’ Day, demanded that the government stop attacking workers; repeal the labor and education laws and change the course of the country’s economy. Dissident teachers demanded a stop to physical, penal and psychological repression.

When the teachers agreed to dialogue with the government, their negotiating commission offered an alternative proposal: repeal the constitutional reform established by the education law and engage in national grassroots debate forums in which students, teachers, parents and education experts participate together.

They disagreed with a reform advocated by the political class that was reduced to administrative and labor measures injurious to education workers. They rejected the concept of schools copying a business structure and climate, as the legislation proposes, whereby education would be the responsibility of a charismatic manager who “manages” a group of employees (teachers) and guarantees customers (students and parents) a good quality service.

The teachers’ proposal argues that teaching requires classroom autonomy and pluralistic education from the bottom up; respecting that it be for everyone, at all levels; restoring seasoned and modern teaching methods in the study plans and programs to provide a three-dimensional expansive education.

For an autonomous union

The dissident teachers put forward something that PAN had promised in the 2000 presidential elections: democratization of the entire union structure. But, when it came into power, PAN had made alliances with the worst of them instead of fulfilling its promise to end corporate and corrupt unions. It even allowed for the increase in Gordillo’s economic and political power. Now the PRI had removed her to impose another who had participated in her corrupt dealings. The dissident teachers insisted on something consistent with their original proposals, which have been denied them but are as basic as the right to freely elect their union representatives.

The government-imposed teachers’ leadership met with the Employers’ Confederation of the Mexican Republic and expressed their agreement with the education reform. Declaring that Mexico had an extraordinary opportunity to make fundamental changes, they pledged to support the reform’s secondary laws.

In the US they also
have standardized tests

In May, groups of dissident teachers demonstrated in the Mexican capital rejecting the visit of US President Obama, whom they described as a representative of the world oligarchy and main promoter of neoliberalism and its structural reforms.

There’s also been an uprising of students, parents and teachers against educational reform and the standardized tests it proposes in the United States. The multinational Pearson Foundation was among those most alarmed by the rebellion because it designed and administered the reforms and has benefited from them.

A distinguished professor emeritus of education sent an open letter to President Obama pointing out that the reform was
being repudiated because it transfers the education sector’s public goods, including facilities, to private administrators, stifles teachers’ collective and independent voice and reduces education to being measured only by standardized tests. In his letter he states that there’s no objective evidence that this reform leads to improved education. He also criticizes the assumption that schools should be like a business run by a CEO, with teachers as workers and students as the raw material. And he asked Obama to remember that opponents of this kind of reform conceive of education as a fundamental human right, not a product. Meanwhile, James C. Scott, a renowned researcher at Yale University, has defined standardized assessments as one of the specific causes of the decline in education in the United States.

“Televisa stultifies,
teachers make us wise!”

Protests against the education law in Mexico have continued to increase. In mid-May thousands of teachers went out onto the streets to demand that the government not impose a teaching model that hasn’t been consulted with society or teachers. They claimed that the education law responds only to the economic and ideological interests of national and foreign business sectors.

A Michoacan teacher marched barefoot carrying a placard on his chest in which he suggested that the assessment begin with President Peña Nieto, who doesn’t read books and doesn’t know the name of some state capitals in his own country. Another rural teacher declared that he would like legislators who don’t even lift a finger from their comfortable armchairs to go out into the Mexican countryside and see the efforts teachers make to teach children from families living in poverty.

When the protestors passed in front of the Televisa facilities the teachers chanted “Televisa stultifies, teachers make us wise!” They called on the media corporation to respect the right to reply because they wanted to respond to all the slander it spreads against the teachers’ movement.

During the second half of May both the marches and the negotiating with the government continued to prevent the elitist, exclusionary reform and the commodification of public education. The protesting teachers warned that they haven’t ruled out a national strike if agreements aren’t signed.

Most of the media, led by the TV stations, intensified their campaign demanding that the State repress the dissident teachers, whom they depict as vandals and a destructive enemy within. The media is denigrating the dissidents’ educational work because they are daring to reject a law they weren’t consulted about and that belittles their professional activity. The media’s campaigns not only didn’t deter the protesters but further encouraged them.

A teaching profession
without decent wages

In an article titled “With the teachers,” Dr. Ackerman contested the media barrage, congratulated the new social movement and emphasized that basic education teachers don’t earn decent wages in line with the enormous importance of their work for society. The 8,000 pesos (US$640) they receive a month isn’t enough to support their families, yet instead of demanding a wage increase, they’ve set aside their own needs and launched a movement for a real improvement in public education and in the classrooms, which have serious maintenance problems.

One of their demands is to legally establish that 6% of the gross domestic product be used for construction, maintenance, equipment, furniture, teaching materials, utilities and the other educational service needs. Ackerman stressed that this demand meets international standards on the subject and recalled that Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development statistic show that Mexico only invests 5.3% of its GDP in public primary and secondary education, 3.3% below what Ghana, Bolivia or Jamaica invest and 8.6% below what Cuba invests.

Another demand by the teachers concerns the requirement to increase the number of basic posts that should be assigned to graduates from public teacher training schools.

Marches and forums

The teachers’ rebellion got the education authority to agree to the holding of nine regional analysis forums and one national forum throughout the country over a two-and-a-half month period. These forums offered in-depth analyses, formulated viable proposals and provided valuable examples of other ways to educate and evaluate.

The dissident teachers conducted the forums while continuing with constant demonstrations demanding repeal of the amendments to articles 3 and 73 of the Constitution, and calling for a national consultation to promote a new education plan for Mexico. Their movement has argued that it has the right to dissent, to disobey bad laws and to not apply programs leading to illiteracy. It argues that it isn’t just capricious rejection but has proof and arguments to show that the reform is tainted by business and privatization. Teachers feel offended, undervalued and even insulted by the law.

Everyone against
the “Enlace” test

In June, teachers from several states rejected the National Assessment of Academic Achievement in Educational Centers (Enlace) test on the eve of its implementation because it promotes an unjust and anti-pedagogical model for assessing teachers, doesn’t integrate the real contexts in which children develop, promotes a homogenization process in order to mechanize society to serve the market and hinders critical thinking. They warned that punishing, threatening and sanctioning teachers would have counter-productive results because achieving real change requires changing the structures that have weakened Mexican education. Using this test to measure the teachers’ work will lead to them neglecting the knowledge required to face life’s challenges.

Some people note that not taking the country’s different realities into account implies discriminating against indigenous peoples. This kind of test, it is argued, foments a fragmented, knowledge of reality that is decontextualized because it doesn’t acknowledge ethnic, cultural, regional and linguistic differences; discriminatory because it doesn’t prepare for a communitarian and intercultural education, instead imposing a single homogenous way of thinking; and mercenary because it privileges competition. The dissident teachers also charged corruption due to prior sales of the assessment tests.

At this juncture, the secretary of education admitted that the test might be discarded and there was talk that the teachers’ rebellion might even sink the education reform or leave it suspended. At that point the business sector, which had sponsored the bill and boasted of being its creator, began to pressure the education authorities not to back down. The authorities called off the discussion with the teachers’ movement and even said they would try to deepen the reform through the secondary laws.

Teachers destabilize the reform

The elitists who had gotten rid of Gordillo had thought everything would go smoothly without her; that it was just a matter of arranging the leadership. They didn’t reckon on the forcefulness of the teachers’ capacity to destabilize the reform but the demonstrations radically changed the correlation of forces in education’s political arena. The teachers’ movement brought right into the national debate issues about the kind of education Mexicans want and the working conditions education requires. Students, parents and teachers have shown that they can formulate initiatives and will not accept the political and business class imposing the education system.

Support by intellectuals

Dr. Luis Aboites, a historian and researcher on educational issues, revealed the simplistic vision of the business proposal as deeply hostile to strengthening regional plurality and identity. He showed that the struggle of the peoples and regions rightly claiming Mexico to be a plural nation have kept entrepreneurial intentions from succeeding. He also pointed out that the dissident teachers’ struggle can’t be reduced to the numerous marches and strikes but has turned into the long and patient formulation of multiple education and assessment plans in several federal institutions, which now prove that the reform is a major backwards step.

Prestigious intellectuals and human rights defenders, among them Pablo González Casanova and Bishop Raúl Vera, signed a document in support of the teachers in struggle and against the labor-administrative reform. They said the amendments to constitutional articles 3 and 73 violate the spirit and letter of the Constitution regarding educational matters, and that the reform is contrary to article 123 of the Constitution, don’t resolve the serious problems of deficiencies in education and in school infrastructure and breaches free education, as the State’s withdrawal from its obligations forces the education system to rely on spurious external financing that could lead to control of public schools by private enterprise.

They also agree that the assessment is racist, classist and discriminatory, as its punitive and standardizing model doesn’t take into account Mexican society or its children’s social, economic, cultural and pluri-lingual conditions.

The document’s signatories oppose the reform because it goes against secular and free public education. They note that the reform initiative comes from entrepreneurial powers-that-be that are seeking to privatize and commodify education and control the students ideologically and politically.

A national form

In July, the teachers went on maximum alert when the legislature began debating the secondary laws to the business-sponsored education reform. A banner in one protest read: “Internal Affairs officials, legislators, public education secretary and SNTE cowboys: Who are you governing for, the people or the businessmen? Reject the education reform’s secondary laws.” The teachers demanded that the debate on these secondary laws be postponed and agreed to hold a national forum with the education authorities on July 12, in which the resolutions from the regional forums’ discussions were made known. Marches against the education bill continued in several states throughout that month.

In the national forum the teachers confirmed that all regional forums opposed the reforml. Analysis of the 400 papers reaffirmed that it is seen as privatizing and violates teachers’ rights.

The main resolution was the demand for repeal of the constitutional amendments to education passed by the Legislature in late 2012. Other demands were the suspension of any measure linked to the reform and postponement of debates on the secondary laws related to it. They also agreed to promote an alternative education model that responds to community demands that the diversity of national cultural wealth be respected.

The forum’s general report stressed that the government has failed to meet its basic obligations, given that the representatives it sent to the forums didn’t participate in the debates and limited themselves to making formal speeches. The report shows the dissident teachers have expressed the political will to dialogue with society and the government.

A significant moment came when a message was transmitted via telephone from Alberto Patishtán, a teacher and Zapatista political prisoner. He urged them not to get discouraged in the goal of building a country with room for everyone. He also let them know that the prison walls haven’t stopped him from continuing his work as a teacher, or taken away his ability to laugh, think and continue fighting.

After the forum the participants marched to Mexico City’s main square to reinforce the dissident teachers’ sit-in, which had begun there in mid-May. The announcement was made that the movement would go into a new stage of struggle.

The Zapatistas’ “educational uprising”

Meanwhile, another kind of education is being tested out in Mexico. In his doctoral dissertation, sociologist and anthropologist Bruno Baronnet emphasized that the emergence of Zapatista schools brought with it an “educational uprising” that rejects the educational legacy of indigenismo (nostalgia for an imagined, folklorized view of indigenousness while targeting contemporary indigenous peoples for assimilation).

Autonomous education in the Zapatista communities is regulated by assemblies, which set their own educational practices that challenge national indigenist policies. Its advocates are strongly committed and under community supervision. The Zapatistas have made a commitment to decolonize education taking account of local organizational particularities when defining how the school functions.

Each autonomous municipality determines its specific and creative autonomous project rather than applying a rigid and uniform model. In other words, there is educational self-government. Autonomy tends to favor social appropriation of the school as an ethnic resistance strategy. Teaching practices are collectively reinvented and applied.

Zapatista schools show that an alternative education from below is possible. While this novelty is being developed in Zapatista territories, teachers in the rest of Mexico continued into August to mobilize in search of an education for life, respect and dignity by taking it out of governmental channels that want to degrade it into a commodity.

Jorge Alonso is a researcher for the Center for Research and Advanced Studies in Social Anthropology (CIESAS) West and envío correspondent in Mexico.

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