Mexico to improve teaching quality via reform

By Alexander Manda

Mexico's government is trying to boost quality of education by stressing fair selection of teachers, unity, transparency and the support from parents, Senator Maria Teresa Ortuno Gurza said in a recent interview.

Ortuno, who heads the education commission in Mexico's upper legislative house, said the government is "really committed to" updating and improving the teacher's selection system, and "that is why exams have been applied to teachers seeking to enter the state education system."

The Mexican government hired 24,000 teachers this year, after the 2009-2010 nationwide exams in mid-August. Around 110,000 applicants took the exam, with more than 75 percent eliminated.

But Ortuno said the results did not mean that Mexico lacks intelligent people.

"If you had an engineer, he knew his field well but might not know how to teach," she said. "The 75 percent who did not pass the exam includes a lot of people who have knowledge but are not trained in teaching."

The exams were designed to end the practice that teachers just sell their positions to potential successors. The practice has been under wide criticism for lowering the nation's teaching quality.

The government's reform in teacher's selection had won the full cooperation of the powerful National Education Workers Union, and the process was an example of enhancing political unity for the country's future, Ortuno said.

She said the Senate had drafted a reform plan that includes 25 key components with the consensus of the nation's three major parties, which were often divided on many other issues.

"We are trying to launch an educational reform with a sense of unity," Ortuno added.

The key guiding principle of the reform is transparency. The plan calls for establishing a "National Education Information System," to compare the Mexican education with other members of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

"There are lots of stories about teachers pushing children to be better, but we need a frame to exchange knowledge and experience," Ortuno said.

She predicted that Mexicans might have some bad news about their education system with the end of relevant studies and the unveiling of statistics, but she said these are just growing pains.

"If you want to improve education in Mexico, you need reliable information first," she said. "We need information to make decisions and consensus ...... if you don't make comparisons you can't make progress."

One thing that the Mexican government is firmly committed to is defending children's rights, she said.

Pupils across the nation should receive education from the third grade onwards and each state and most cities have what is called Comprehensive Family Development Council, a body led by the local government responsible for protecting children's rights, she noted.

She said parent's commitment is "another essential factor to improve education" when the government cannot take education all into its own hand.

"The key to success is getting commitment from both teachers and parents," she said. "If you have this combination then you have good schools. "

"Parents can help in many different ways, like asking children whether they have done homework and what the teacher said every day," Ortuno said.

Good schools are created when there is unity from the four key actors: parents, unions, government and management, said the senator.

Source: Xinhua