Interview: Mexican students become victims in teachers' conflict with gov't

Mexico's decades-long conflict between dissident teachers and the government has left generations of students with incomplete educations, according to non-governmental organization Mexicanos Primero (Mexicans First).

Nowhere is that truer than in the southern state of Oaxaca, bastion of the dissident teachers, who has recently locked in conflicts with the government over a series of education reforms enacted in 2013.

The director of the NGO, David Calderon, said that by the time local students graduate from primary school, they have missed an entire academic year as teachers had taken part in protest marches.

"In six years, a child in Oaxaca misses at least 200 days" of classroom instruction, which is equivalent to a school year in Mexico, Calderon told Xinhua in an interview on Tuesday.

The NGO, which backs the government reforms, said that "for more than 22 years, children in (Oaxaca) state public schools have not been able to enjoy a complete academic year."

While the conflict between dissident teachers and the government has a long history, the latest flare-up in tension has largely centered in the reforms, which teachers say threaten their jobs by instating periodic evaluations.

For more than six months, teachers belonging to the Oaxaca-based National Coordinator of Education Workers (CNTE), the dissident arm of the national teachers' union, have occupied the central square of the state capital, Oaxaca, erected roadblocks on major highways leading in and out of town, and occasionally vandalized government offices.

Earlier this month, eight CNTE supporters were killed in a clashes with police trying to break up a protest.

The protests have spread to other states, including Guerrero, Chiapas and Michoacan, but Oaxaca continues to be the most troubled, affecting some 891,000 students at 14,226 public preschools, and primary and secondary schools.

"The situation in Oaxaca is historically very complicated, very entangled," said Calderon, a former professor at Mexico's National Autonomous University (UNAM).

Among member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), Mexico ranked lowest in student performance, behind Turkey, Greece and the Slovak Republic, in a 2012 study.

The Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), applied to the OECD's 34 members, shows nine out of every 10 elementary school students in Oaxaca fall into the lowest two categories.

Some "88.9 percent of Oaxaca's students are in that situation," said Calderon, despite the fact that there are as many as 87,000 teachers on the state payroll, 70,000 of them members of the CNTE, and the remainder members of the regular National Union of Education Workers (SNTE).

According to those figures, the state's teacher to student ratio is 1 per 10 or 11 students, which would be more than ideal, but in reality between 20,000 and 30,000 "teachers" collect wages without actually giving classes, said Calderon.

This irregularity was allowed to continue for more than two decades, during which the CNTE was in control of the state educational sector. In 2015, the state government wrested back control.

"They collect (wages) as teachers, but they carry out political activism for parties, for mayors or for the CNTE itself," said Calderon, whose organization campaigns to uphold the reforms and any other policies designed to improve education in Mexico.

The reforms also aim to banish the long-running practice in Mexico of bequeathing a teaching position from one generation to the next within a family, or selling it.

But as a recent article in the academic journal Georgetown Public Policy Review notes, "the overhaul of the education system has proven to be limited in its scope."

According to the author, one problem is that "instead of ensuring standardized quality education through a single national system," the government has let state and local authorities decide how to operate their educational institutions.

Calderon believes the government will have to be flexible in its approach to make the reforms work, "and try different solutions to comply with the (new) law." Enditem