The Education System of Mexico

Abstract

This contribution outlines the historical development of the Mexican education system, presents an overview of its institutional and organizational structure since 1921, and discusses selected educational trends. The chapter argues that throughout the twentieth century, the system struggled to catch up with a dramatically expanding population that was divided by enormous social, economic, and cultural inequalities and that a number of contingent mechanisms were devised in order to standardize unequal growth in different areas and compensate for social and economic problems that schooling per se could not resolve. It will be shown that the divides between indigenous/rural and urban populations, men and women, regional and central educational traditions, among other factors, were only to an extent ameliorated by a more or less centralized educational system that unified administration, curriculum, and school textbooks. It will be analyzed how the very expansion of the system created further divisions: teachers belonging to different jurisdictions (the central state or each federal state), disparities between state-funded and nonstate funded institutions, and a stratification of educational options for an increasing demand, in particular in upper secondary and tertiary education. The analysis of the 1990s political reforms tending towards de-centralization, de-regulation, and accountability will show how the way in which the funds for education were allocated changed, especially regarding the new weight given to evaluation – schools and teachers had to be evaluated in order to compete for resources – which further increased inequalities between schools in marginal contexts and those in more socially privileged ones. At the same time, since the 1990s, direct cash transfers from the government to families with school aged children generalized throughout the country as a compensatory mechanism to the pressing social factors that lead to school dropout.