Breathe
By Nurit Martínez
The government of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has quietly received the results of the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) test that measures learning in Mexico, applied by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), and is preparing a strategy to announce the results, which are not expected to change Mexico's status: last place among the economies of that organization.
But the first thing the government of the Fourth Transformation did was to set aside those who head the National Commission for the Continuous Improvement of Education (Mejoredu), most of whom are close to the new government, and instead turned to one of the institutions with the most experience in applying tests: the National Evaluation Center for Higher Education (Ceneval).
Ceneval (1994) now takes over the conduct of a test in which Mexico has participated since 2000. To give context, let us remember that Ceneval is a civil association created in a context in which a significant number of students and families wanted their children to study at the UNAM, the IPN or the UAM, and to moderate this demand, this institution was created, which today conducts millions of annual tests to enter institutions or different educational levels (high school, undergraduate or graduate) but also to provide quality certification of professionals.
Ceneval's board of directors is made up of the directors of the country's most renowned public and private university rectors, as well as professional associations.
Today, Antonio Dávila Díaz is at the helm of this institution (2019-2023). In the previous 24 years, Dávila had various responsibilities in the Ministry of Public Education (SEP), among which stand out: Undersecretary of Planning, Evaluation and Coordination and before that in the Federal Administration of Educational Services in the then Federal District. Formed under the shelter of Elba Esther Gordillo's group that arrived at the SEP during the Calderon years.
It is with this Ceneval that the SEP, through an agreement, gave it the responsibility of preparing, coordinating, selecting schools, measuring the evaluation instrument and contextualizing it to the close realities of vulnerability in our country or foreseeing the presentation of results.
The SEP left Mejoredu out of this responsibility, since its predecessor, the National Institute for the Evaluation of Education (INEE) had this responsibility since 2001. While this decision was made inside Mejoredu, according to what they say, there was not even a bit of astonishment that they had been stripped of this task.
Three incumbents in the Ministry of Public Education (SEP) in five years, added to the inconsistency and lack of direction in the program proposed by Esteba Moctezuma. The political opportunism of the administration of Delfina Gómez and the limited vision of the administration of the current secretary, Leticia Ramírez, trying to tackle the entanglements of the Fourth Transformation itself with the textbooks and the new curriculum, resulted in Mejoredu becoming a space for friends, recommended friends and cronies.
As a token, the teacher of the president's youngest son was incorporated into the decision-making management group, but sources within the institution report that her lack of technical and substantive knowledge of evaluation became evident on a day-to-day basis. With a degree in Communication and having as educational experience having been a teacher at the Manuel Bartolomé Cossío Elementary School, María del Coral González, has shown that she is not up to the task and her participation and votes are in the style of many deputies who were drawn by lot by the Morenista movement.
According to the counter-reform of the Fourth Transformation (2019) Mejoredu would take over the role of INEE and would be in charge of creating a new vision to measure the progress of learning and also make organizations such as the OECD see that tests such as reading, mathematics, science should consider more the vulnerabilities of other nations, or the need to evaluate with a focus on inequality.
And although inside Mejoredu they deny that the evaluation experts and technicians left the institution, the truth is that specialists who created an organization such as INEE, which achieved in a few years the seriousness of creating reliable evaluation instruments with social recognition, transmitting that professional spirit to the institutes that were created in the states, and even became a precedent in the countries of the region, left for other institutions.
The INEE had to open its vision to be more inclusive with indigenous communities and those living in areas of extreme poverty, particularly those in the belts of metropolitan areas, no doubt. We need to know in what conditions they go to school, how are those schools, those teachers and the context of violence and drug use, but the Morenista sentence that they were co-opted by a neoliberal vision fell on the institution and nothing saved it.
Today, by setting Mejoredu aside, the same government ratifies much of the ink and reflections that ran in those years about the mistake of disappearing INEE. Since it was made up of so many technicians and specialists, it lacked politics.
What has happened in recent years with Mejoredu reveals the lack of confidence generated by the institution, which in the last few days held a forum on healthy food and prolonged sessions on the importance of children learning to eat traditional food: plates of beans, atoles or tamales, which undoubtedly reflects where the institution is going.
Without greater clarity in its objective, it has not been able to stand up to the government of the Fourth Transformation to point out the setback in the level of learning in primary, secondary and high school after the pandemic, the results of its evaluation went unnoticed, all because it did not bother the president and his movement.
It lost autonomy and without authority there is no one from that institution to point out that it is necessary to know the condition of the schools, the teacher training, how the children are doing in basic learning and even more the emotional impact, all this after the Covid pandemic.
When in 2021, Mexico announced the continuity of the PISA test, endorsed by President López Obrador himself, our country became more obliged by the trade agreements with that organization and its permanence in that group of high exchange economies. One of the first topics ratified was the comparative evaluation of learning in 15 year olds to measure the future competitiveness of the countries' labor force.
Educational disaster repeats itself
In 2000, Mexico was measured against 41 countries and the PRI government of Ernesto Zedillo was accused of hiding the results that placed us in last place.
Under Fox's administration, the focus was to learn about the test, to build an institution that would allow the OECD forums to present the Mexican reality, to include new levels of international qualification that would include children with insufficient results, level zero, and to know the results.
During Felipe Calderón's administration, the goal was to improve results. The then Secretary of Public Education, Josefina Vázquez Mota, promised that by the end of her administration Mexico would be in the middle of the ranking table, sharing performance with countries such as Spain, and for this purpose they established that teachers would focus on teaching how to solve the PISA exam, but they also cheated: to prevent young people with low performance from taking the test on the day it was administered.
In the middle of the administration of Enrique Peña Nieto, also a PRI member, the test was applied and Mexico was last in performance among OECD countries. At level 53 out of 78 in reading, 57 in science and 61 in mathematics in the global ranking led by China and Singapore with results that had up to one hundred points more than the Mexican results.
This means that the results have given evidence that in our country children and young people at 15 years of age are not able to read an instruction manual in a medicine box, perform basic mathematical operations and that more than half of those living in poverty have no skills in the use of technology because access to computers, let alone internet, is one out of two in vulnerable areas.
PISA is applied every three years, but in 2021, in the midst of the pandemic, its application was postponed to 2022 to deliver the results in the first days of December 2023.
In Mexico, it was applied from April 27 to May 31 in 281 schools and to 6,292 students.
On this occasion, in addition to measuring reading ability and skills, text comprehension, mathematics and science, the OECD included creative thinking for the first time.
The idea of measuring creative thinking is focused on provoking that in the coming years countries can generate policies to enhance metacognition and creativity to solve problems.
In 2011 in a conversation with Andreas Schleicher, creator of PISA, he told me that the Mexican government's strategy for education at the time predicted that in 50 years Mexico would reach the average high performance level of all OECD countries. With the results on your desk, what will you think now?
The opinions expressed are the responsibility of the authors and are absolutely independent of the position and editorial line of the company. Opinion 51.
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