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Recipients, agents, or partners?: The contradictions of teacher participation in Mexican secondary education reform

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Abstract

The countries of Latin America have been no exception to global calls for educational transformation and teacher professionalization at the secondary level. One of the newest of these reforms is Mexico’s Reforma de la Educación Secundaria (RS) (Reform of Secondary Education), launched in 2006. This article examines portrayals by various actors of the nature and extent of the participation of both teachers and the teachers’ union in the different phases of the RS, beginning with the initial formulation of the reform through the implementation and the “follow-up.” Findings indicate that in spite of efforts to provide more transparency and opportunities for teacher participation, for the most part secondary teachers in Mexico neither felt like agents nor partners in the RS, nor did they function as such in the reform process. As in previous reform efforts, teachers mostly felt that they were recipients of plans formulated by government officials, and as a result many have evidenced neither complete compliance nor full commitment to the reform. The national teachers’ union, meanwhile, claims to represent teachers’ voices and thus a form of teacher participation, but this claim is denied in the findings. The discussion and conclusions emphasize the multiple significations of teacher “participation” and the need to overcome system-wide contradictions, while drawing on theory about the conditioned state, bureaucracy, and democratizing civil society to help situate and explain the findings.

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Notes

  1. The reform was initially known as the Reforma Integral de la Educación Secundaria (RIES) (Comprehensive Reform of Secondary Education). However, during the final stages of its formulation the reform had clearly become focused mainly on changes in curriculum and teacher training, and therefore would not be as comprehensive as had originally been proposed. The name change was announced by the Secretaría de Educación Pública (SEP) (Ministry of Education) in April, 2006.

  2. Lower secondary level is equivalent to middle or junior high school, or grades 7, 8, and 9 in the United States.

  3. In the Mexican reform, the “plan of study” refers to the overall structure of the curriculum and the number of hours allotted to each subject over a school week, in each of the 3 years of study, while the “program of study” refers to the structure and contents of each subject curriculum within the plan.

  4. All translations from Spanish to English, unless otherwise noted, are conducted by the authors.

  5. Interestingly, critics of SNTE range across the ideological spectrum. Guillermo Bustamante, president of La Unión Nacional de Padres de Familia (UNPF), a conservative parent organization which advocates for education reform, alleged that SNTE is “more interested in establishing a new political party than becoming involved in raising the quality of education in Mexico, which should be its primary concern” (Rendón Solares 2004b). Many academics on the left, meanwhile, decry the anti-democratic stranglehold that Gordillo exercises over the union, as well as the yawning gap between her progressive rhetoric about reform and the concrete actions the union takes.

  6. See Datnow (2000), Dozier (2009), Hargreaves (1996), Hiatt-Michael (2001), Levinson and Casas (2009), Tatto (2007), Torres (2000a, b), Weiss (1995).

  7. “Agreement 384” designates an official government decree that carries the status of law.

  8. The PAN political party was the party in control of the federal government at the time. Other significant parties in Mexico include the PRI, which held a monopoly on the government for much of the last century, and the PRD.

  9. The reader may note the frequency with which the phrase “sitting behind a desk” is used in these debates about policy reform. It is a very common trope amongst teacher complaints about the reform that those who design new programs have little classroom experience and “sit behind desks” in Mexico City; the implication is that reformers have neither the practical experience nor the moral legitimacy to design reforms.

  10. The term “new proposal” here refers to the modified proposal that was created as a result of intense disapproval regarding some aspects of the plan originally proposed in June 2004. At the time the pilot phase of the implementation began in August 2005, Education Secretary Tamez Guerra noted that the reform had undergone six revisions from the time it had originally been proposed (del Valle 2005b).

  11. Michoacán, Sinaloa, and the Federal District of Mexico were the only areas of the country which did not participate in the pilot phase of the implementation during the 2005–2006 school year (del Valle 2005a, b). However, even within schools which opted to participate in the pilot phase, there were teachers who refused to implement the reform plan (Aviles 2005).

  12. Our phrase “teaching advisor” is an attempt to translate a ubiquitous figure in the Mexican secondary system: the apoyo técnico-pedagógico, or jefe de enseñanza. The former, known informally as an ATP, is usually a commissioned teacher, while the latter is a permanent position, well located in the occupational hierarchy above the directorship of a school. Both are charged with the task of “accompanying” teachers in their pedagogical practice by making regular observational visits to schools and providing suggestions for improvement. They are also supposed to be in charge of much of the in-service training and professional development activities.

  13. For instance, the CCI for the new civic education subject, Formación Cívica y Etica, included representatives from the Ministry of the Interior (Gobernación), the National Institute for Youth, the Federal Electoral Institute, the National Council for the Prevention of Discrimination, and various non-governmental organizations working on issues of human rights, gender equity, democracy, drug use prevention, and youth empowerment.

  14. In fact, by the end of 2010 the CCIs had effectively been disbanded by the Subsecretary of Basic Education—clearly a step backwards in terms of state-civil society collaboration, and in terms of reflexive policy modification.

  15. Cuervo et al. (2009) cite evidence from interviews with students and observers’ notes to indicate that this is most likely to happen when the SEP observers are actually present.

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  1. School of Education, Indiana University, Room 4228 201 N. Rose Ave., Bloomington, IN, 47405, USA

    Bradley A. Levinson, Janet Blackwood & Valerie Cross

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Levinson, B.A., Blackwood, J. & Cross, V. Recipients, agents, or partners?: The contradictions of teacher participation in Mexican secondary education reform. J Educ Change 14, 1–27 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10833-012-9193-2

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