EDUCATION: Low Marks for Mexico

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Diego Cevallos

MEXICO CITY, Oct 7 2004 (IPS) - The 33-student class taught by Alejandra Avendaño, a Mexican schoolteacher, includes children from four different grade levels, who are not benefiting from the experience.

Although Mexico spends more on education as a proportion of gross domestic product (GDP) than the average of the industrialised nations grouped in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), Avendaño’s school cannot afford to hire another teacher or purchase new teaching materials.

"If we had more funding for teachers and materials, the children would be better educated, but this is what we are given by the authorities," complains Avendaño, 38, who teaches at a "multi-grade" school in a rural area of the state of Mexico, near the capital.

Last year, Mexico earmarked 5.9 percent of GDP to education, 0.03 percent more than the average spent on education by the 30 OECD member states. One out of four of Mexico’s primary schools are multi-grade, where educators simultaneously teach students of different levels.

"If there are more funds for education, as the government claims, why don’t they provide us with another teacher and new materials," quips Avendaño.

OECD studies indicate that Mexico spends 93.6 percent of its educational budget on administration and bureaucracy, a proportion almost 13 percent higher than the average in the OECD, of which Mexico is the only Latin American member.

In absolute terms, Mexico spends an annual average of 1,357 dollars on every primary school student, a quarter of the OECD average, and 4,341 dollars on each higher education student, half of the OECD average.

The conservative government of Vicente Fox, which inherited an educational system that had already made great strides in quantitative terms, maintains that it is working hard to make spending on education more efficient and improve the performance of students, one of the big challenges it faces today.

Nevertheless, the budget for 2005 that parliament is to pass before the end of the year indicates no significant changes aimed at cutting spending on bureaucracy and improving educational standards.

The Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which governed Mexico from 1929 to 2000, used to boast of its achievements in the area of education. Yet it was reluctant to admit that the expansion of coverage was not accompanied by improvements in the quality of teaching.

While the party was in power, Mexico’s illiteracy rate plunged from 70 to 10 percent, and the average years of formal education climbed to the second year of high school.

However, little was known about the quality of teaching until studies began to reveal in 2000 that Mexico was actually earning a failing grade.

The last PRI administration, the government of Ernesto Zedillo (1994-2000), hushed up the low score Mexico had earned in an assessment carried out in 40 countries by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement.

In the 1995 study, Mexican students in the third and fourth years of primary school and the first and second years of secondary school ranked lowest in math and science.

One of the most recent studies was carried out last year in 43 countries by the OECD and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), measuring the academic performance of 15-year-olds.

The Mexican students ranked 34th in science and reading and 35th in math. Although Mexico performed better than the other Latin American countries studied, it hardly earned a passing grade, according to Andreas Schleicher, director of the Indicators and Analysis Division of the OECD’s Directorate for Education.

"We will never achieve the top positions if we persist in neglecting what is most important in education – the students, in particular the youngest ones", says Alejandra Avendaño.

Experts on education say children studying in multi-grade schools, such as the one in which Avendaño works, perform poorly in reading comprehension and solving mathematical problems, since they do not receive enough attention from their teachers.

In Mexico, a country of 102 million, about 30 million children and adolescents attend school, half of them at primary level. They are taught by 1.5 million teachers, most of them members of trade unions, who earn an average of 12,000 dollars a year.

The trade unions have close ties with the PRI, as do labour organisations in other sectors, which helped the party stay in power in the past.

Fox, the first non-PRI president in seven decades, preferred to get on well with the teachers’ unions and not confront their leaders who, according to dissident groups of teachers, are widely corrupt.