MEXICO CITY — When the federal policeman approached the strikers, they started to sing the national anthem. “I am Mexican,” the policeman told them. “You are Mexican. But there are thousands of Mexicans behind me who just want to get on their way. So I am asking you to free at least one lane — just one lane.”  It was 5:30 p.m. on Friday, April 5, and the middle of the highway that goes from Mexico City to sunny Acapulco, in the state of Guerrero. For two hours a group of some 2,000 teachers from Guerrero had been blocking traffic both ways. Two weeks earlier, at the beginning of the most important vacation of the year, the teachers staged a protest on the same highway for more than nine hours, creating chaos for travelers.  “Give me half an hour for consultations,” one of the strikers’ leaders said. “Fifteen minutes,” the policeman replied. The exchange was broadcast live on Mexican television, and so was what followed: the teachers’ refusal to lift the blockade and their forcible removal by about 2,000 federal police.  The teachers were protesting an education-reform plan approved by Congress in February and the implementing legislation now under discussion. They say the reform does not contemplate Mexico’s “diversity and plurality.”  Among other things, the reform proposes to evaluate teachers with national standardized tests; the results would then be reviewed by a newly created institute and used to determine promotions, salaries or dismissals. Until now, the careers of Mexico’s teachers had little to do with performance and a lot to do with politics and compliance with directives from the teachers’ union.  Although it is couched as a move to improve the quality of education, the reform really is an effort to wrest control of the system away from the union and put it back in the government’s hands. The legislation says nothing about budgets, curricula, classroom size or learning methods.  “Standardized national tests?” Gabino Cué Monteagudo, the governor of Oaxaca, asked, dubious, when I interviewed him last Wednesday. Oaxaca, which neighbors Guerrero, is Mexico’s poorest state, with more than 1.2 million students and only 74,000 teachers. Hundreds of schools in the state have only one teacher for several grades. Hundreds more are so far from where teachers live that classes can be held only three days a week. One-third of the population are native speakers of a language other than Spanish.  “Can we expect the same from a student in Mexico City as from an indigenous girl whose first language is not Spanish and has no knowledge of the Internet?” Cué asked. “Can we evaluate equally the teacher who has to travel five hours every week to get to a classroom and the one who gets in a car with air-conditioning? Couldn’t we include all these factors?”  But President Enrique Peña Nieto and congressional leaders have said they will not change course and will push through the reform as it is before the end of this month, when the legislature goes on summer recess. In response, teachers from the states of Guerrero and Oaxaca, as well as Michoacán, have announced new and more “forceful” actions starting next week.  Expect more policemen and more teachers to face off in the middle of some highway — and expect Mexico to stay at the bottom of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s education rankings.  Carlos Puig is a columnist for the Mexican newspaper Milenio and the anchor of the television show En 15.
Supposedly a plan to improve the quality of schooling, Mexico&#8217;s education reform is a move to put down the teachers&#8217; union.