In less than two months, Mexico’s President Claudia Sheinbaum faces a pivotal decision regarding the future of the nation’s public education system. In April, she is expected to unveil a five-year national development plan outlining her education initiatives and priorities, among other issues. The announcement will clarify whether she intends to continue the shift initiated in 2019 by her predecessor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, thereby abandoning decades of equity-focused policies.
Her decision will have deep consequences for the education sector in a country that has long lagged behind its OECD peers and other countries, such as Singapore and Vietnam, in student performance.
So far, Sheinbaum has concentrated on preserving and expanding AMLO’s initiatives from the previous administration, particularly universal scholarship programs and boosting enrollment in higher education. This includes “Rita Cetina”—a scholarship program for high school students—and efforts to establish new universities to improve access to higher education for underprivileged students. She also has signaled her intent to continue with the “New Mexican School” national curriculum developed by AMLO’s government, in spite of criticism from many experts that the program lacks clear goals and standards, as well as other aids to implementation.
On the other hand, Sheinbaum has reinstated an early child care and education center program suspended by AMLO, who saw it as a breeding ground for corruption. In the early days of her administration, she also committed to scaling up a program of day-long schools abandoned by her predecessor. Both policies contribute to student learning and achievement.
A shift towards greater centralization in the decision-making of the previous administration is continuing, with more opportunities for states to drive initiatives due to shrinking federal oversight capabilities. While there is some collaboration with state governments, political considerations remain prominent in policy design.
In line with this trend, Sheinbaum has eliminated the National Commission for the Evaluation of Education (MEJOREDU), the institution that assessed student knowledge and skills, and seems committed to maintaining her predecessor’s policy of dismantling the programs designed to appoint teachers based on relevant knowledge and skills. Instead, she has handed additional power to the National Teachers’ Union (SNTE), the nation’s largest and most powerful labor union, which tends to prioritize political loyalty.
This close relationship deserves attention. Earlier this month, the SNTE promised the ruling Morena party to enroll 2.5 million teachers in the party’s membership rolls. This alignment will likely affect the relationship between the executive and the 11 state governors who belong to opposition parties, raising uncertainty over the quality of the education system.
The big picture
Mexico’s education system has long grappled with inequality, but significant reforms were implemented alongside Mexico’s integration into NAFTA during Carlos Salinas de Gortari’s presidency (1988-1994). His administration launched a program to modernize basic education, reformed the curriculum, and developed a new generation of textbooks. At the same time, compensatory initiatives to support education in the impoverished South were also implemented. These systemic reforms were complemented by the expansion of technological and polytechnic universities, part of the Instituto Politécnico Nacional network, which offers training in technical fields aligned with the economic needs of different regions.
These universities, which still operate today, have aligned with export-oriented industries directly affected by NAFTA. During President Enrique Peña Nieto’s administration (2012-2018), dual study programs were introduced, providing flexible pathways for continued higher education. Over 80% of students served by these institutions are the first in their families to access university studies.
Successive administrations continued to refine many of these policies, maintaining education as a priority for public spending and promoting equity as an educational goal. Despite significant resources devoted to the education system—education spending as a portion of GDP rose from 3.4% in 1990 to 5.1% in 2014 before dropping to 4.2% in 2021 under AMLO—improvements were hindered by misalignment between federal and state priorities, between system-wide and targeted efforts, and insufficient institutional capacity.
Despite these challenges, Mexico has raised education levels through increases in the duration of compulsory schooling—which expanded from six to nine years in 1992, adding three years of preschool in 2002, and from nine to 12 years in 2012. As a result, the population’s educational attainment increased considerably beginning in the 1980s. On average, the Mexican population now has ten years of schooling, an increase from 8.6 years in 2010.
However, disparities remain pronounced in upper-secondary education. In 2019, 64% of the Indigenous population between the ages of fifteen and seventeen were enrolled in school, compared with 76% among their non-Indigenous peers. In highly marginalized cities, the figure is 65%, compared with 77% in cities with low marginalization. Among school-age youths working more than twenty hours a week, only 29% were enrolled.
How to get good results from education policy
Education policies need continuity to succeed—that is the conclusion reached in our studies of ambitious education reforms in Poland, Portugal, and Singapore, at Harvard’s Global Education Innovation Initiative.
Take Singapore’s case. When Singapore became independent on August 9, 1965, the country had lower education indicators and lower levels of education investment than Mexico. But over the last quarter century, Singapore has built a high-performing education system in which the poorest students have greater knowledge and skills than wealthier students in Mexico.
In the latest Program for International Students Assessment (PISA) test, the poorest 25% of students in Singapore scored 520 in mathematics, higher than the average OECD score (460) and higher than the average score of the wealthiest 25% of students in Mexico (440). Sound education policies have yielded similar results in Vietnam, where the poorest 20% of students achieve PISA performance comparable to that of the wealthiest 20% of students in Mexico.
Since its inception, the Mexican educational system has focused on inclusive policies, such as expanding enrollment and providing textbooks, as well as targeted policies and programs such as establishing a directorate of Indigenous schools, community schools sponsored by CONAFE (the National Council of Educational Development), full-time schools, polytechnic universities, and intercultural universities. These policies showed remarkable continuity between the 1990s and 2018. Such stability has provided more opportunities to current generations than previous ones. But the results are far short of the aspirations—and closing that gap is key to improving equity in outcomes.
However, the failure to sustain the implementation of sound policies over time, such as the inconsistency in efforts to select teachers based on demonstrated knowledge and skills, has led to a failure to transform economic and social opportunities in the country.
The consequences of poor policy implementation
And that failure has led to persistent economic inequalities being reproduced in upper secondary education. According to PISA studies, although access to education has increased, student competency levels remain low in international comparisons, particularly in mathematics and reading. When systemic and targeted policies align, like they did with Mexico’s expansions of compulsory education, the results are considerable.
However, when these synergies are lacking, improvements do not materialize. The issue hinges on the fact that education has often been politicized in Mexico, dating back to the 1940s. Political resistance doomed President Felipe Calderón’s extension of the school day in 2007, while Peña Nieto’s 2013 Education Reform Act sought to replace political considerations with technical evaluations in teaching careers—only for AMLO to reverse these efforts in 2019. Political alignment between governors, the president, and the teachers’ union has played a critical role in sustaining such coherence and continuity of policies—or in derailing them.
AMLO’s emphasis on access to higher education and cash transfer programs and his ceding of control over appointments to the teachers’ union, if carried on by his successor, will likely not improve the opportunities for the children of the poor to gain knowledge and skills that can help them escape poverty. Overlooking the lessons learned from three decades of education policies aimed at advancing equity is unlikely to transform the economic and social opportunities for the poor in Mexico or enhance the overall population’s knowledge and skills.
Hopefully, Sheinbaum will take a different approach, learning from the past’s successes and failures and drawing on evidence and expert knowledge as the foundation of education policy that Mexico needs for a promising future.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Fernando Reimers
Reading Time: 5 minutesReimers, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, studies the implementation of ambitious education reforms around the world. He is the author or editor of 55 books and over 100 articles, and a member of the US National Academy of Education, the International Academy of Education and the Council of Foreign Relations.
