Government Policies
Mexican government has followed a policy of �positive discrimination� to address the issue of inequality in education by launching various compensatory programs, such as:
PROGESA - scholarships for poorest students to improve access, PARE - for students in 4 poorest Mexican states, and a program for improving education of the indigenous people through a policy of �bilingual-bicultural education.�
Table 6: Policy Objectives of Education Reforms in
|
Institutional Reform and decentralization |
|
Curriculum reform |
|
Increase spending on education |
Source: Gajardo (1999): Reimers(2000) Unequal Schools Unequal Chances
Moreover, as mentioned in table 6 above, the Mexican government also initiated education reforms to improve the system through decentralization, institutional reform, curricular reform and efforts to increase public spending on education. Starting with 1992, the ANMEB agreement between the center , the states and the national teacher union (SNTE) resulted in the formal start of the reforms through a decentralization process with shifting of education sector from center to the states (Lopez-Acevedo, Gladys. 2004,). The second objective of ANMEB was curricular reforms, and thirdly an effort to improve the teacher quality through a program (Carrera Magisteria) for in-service teacher training and voluntary performance evaluation and incentive system (Lopez-Acevedo, Gladys. 2004.)
I discuss these policies and programs in detail below.
Government Programs
Programs addressing ACCESS divides: PROGRESA (now Oportunidades ):
PROGRESA is a conditional cash transfer program to improve enrollments, as explained below.
�The ideal of a conditional cash transfer program for education is to give parents incentives to do something they were not doing before, namely send their children to school and keep them at school. Efficiency of the program is measured by the number of additional children going to school per dollar spent. Currently, Progresa is targeted on the poor (below an undisclosed poverty line) in marginal rural communities. All poor households in these communities with children 6 to 18 years old qualify to receive a transfer to attend school between the 3rd year of secondary (as of 2000)� (de Janvry, Sadoulet, 2003.)
A critique of PROGRESA for Primary schools:
In
Hence, for primary school students, the benefits of the Progresa program are very limited and do not justify the high cost of the program.
PROGRESA for SECONDARY SCHOOLS
However, �it is only in the secondary school that dropout rate become alarming�only 67% of the children who finish primary school enroll in secondary. Progesa achieved the remarkable result of raising the educational level of the poor to that of the non-poor in the same communities (76%)� (de Janvry, Sadoulet, 2003.)
However, in secondary schools �65% of the subsidized poor do not need a subsidy to send their children to school. 24% of the poor are offered a subsidy, which is insufficient for them to decide sending their children to school, and 26% of the non-poor do not send their children to school, which they might do if they received a subsidy. While every qualifying child receives $200/year, the effective cost of bringing an additional child to secondary school is $1,350. Clearly, targeting uniform cash transfers on the basis of poverty is a highly inefficient criterion if raising achievements is the goal�.
One can show (see Sadoulet and de Janvry, 2003) that optimum use of a budget spent to increase school enrollment consists in:
- Targeting the children most at risk of not going to school.
- Calibrating the transfers across children, with higher transfers to the children more at risk. The exact amount transferred is determined to equalize the marginal cost of sending one more child to school across the different risk levels�.
Predicting who is at risk of not going to school is not more difficult, and infact easier, than predicting who is likely to be poor. For a Mexican child in a poor community, the main predictors of risk of not going to school are age (positive), gender (positive for girls), rank of the child in the family (negative), educational levels of the parents and older siblings (negative), parents� poverty status (positive), quality of dwelling (negative), presence of a secondary school in the village(negative), and distance to a secondary school if there is none in the village (positive)���For the same budget as currently used in targeting educational transfers on poverty, targeting on risk would increase Progresa�s gain in participation in secondary school by 65%� (De Janury and Sadoulet, 2003)
My note: I agree with the policy recommendation of De Janvry and Sadoulet about targeting the PROGRESA program to students from at-risk communities rather than to all students from poor income families. However, its implementation would require a greater degree of decentralized decision making and a better MIS system - to identify students at risk on the basis of the 8 criteria suggested by them. Thus this recommendation maybe implemented in a phased manner along with capacity building for improved data gathering and improved decision making at the local level.
Importance of capacity building for Educational Research and EMIS
Chilean education reform has been effective in reducing inequalities in education and creation of a research database has been a key instrument in its success. �Educational research is another activity developed by the NGOs, in large part with the assistance of international co-operation. This activity has produced a solid and vast body of knowledge on Chilean educational reality, with strong emphasis on education in impoverished areas. There was, therefore, a fairly complete database that served as input for the definition of the educational policies put forward by the democratic government of the �Concertation� and which aided in the formulation of needs and priorities, as well as highlighting existing deficiencies in national education,� !
(Flip,
1993)
Education of Indigenous people �reforms in the 1990s
The policies of the government, since 1990s, for basic education of the indigenous people are two complementary ones:
1. �The supply of educational services specifically destined to Indian groups and adapted to their needs, demands, linguistic and cultural conditions, type of settlements, social organization, and type of production and work.
2. An active struggle against overt and covert forms of racism and discrimination by means of the national primary school curriculum. Indian people�s historic contribution to the building of the nation, as well as the understanding of their situation and the problems and the recognition of their contribution to the Mexican life in general, will be accentuated.� (Poder Ejecutivo Federal 1995 - Schmelkes, 2000).
For this purpose, the government has aimed at �bilingual-bicultural education,� which means that school students will be taught in their own Indian language for the first two years of primary school. �Third grade onwards Spanish would be gradually introduced, and by sixth grade the instruction would predominantly be in Spanish� (Schmelkes, 2000). Research has shown that �bilingual education is the best way for reaching a mastery in oral and written Spanish� for those students whose mother tongue is not Spanish (Schmelkes, 2000).
Further, the government has allowed greater autonomy to the schools emphasizing collective decision making in school activities - on part of indigenous communities. They have the power to make changes in the curriculum to make it more �culturally relevant� and to help in inculcating the values and knowledge of their community (Schmelkes, 2000).
Moreover, new and better ways of in-service teacher training are being developed � to make the teachers more culturally attuned to local, social environment - besides honing their instructional skills.
Furthermore, compensatory programs for poor and marginalized communities are already in place � and are applicable to the indigenous people also. The policy �strengthens investment in schools and teachers in poorest areas and in the poorest municipalities in the rest of the states� (Schmelkes, 2000). The Indian schools are automatically included. The program generally includes incentives for teachers in these schools, headmaster�s and teachers� training, school libraries and other resource material and textbooks and other school supplies for the students. It has also resulted in development of textbooks in thirty-three different Indian languages and nineteen �linguistic variations.� (Schmelkes, 2000).
However, despite the variety of policy initiatives taken by the government, the current state of education for indigenous people is not improved, as discussed below.
Yahoo! Messenger - want a free & easy way to contact your friends online?
_______________________________________________ Assam mailing list [email protected] http://pikespeak.uccs.edu/mailman/listinfo/assam
Mailing list FAQ: http://pikespeak.uccs.edu/assam/assam-faq.html To unsubscribe or change options: http://pikespeak.uccs.edu/mailman/options/assam
