Power and Politics: Insights from Mexico's Education Reforms

Power and Politics: Insights from Mexico's Education Reforms

Speaker: Sylvia Schmelkes, Honorary Researcher, Universidad Iberoamericano, and former President, Governing Board of the Mexican National Institute for the Evaluation of Education

This session will be held ONLINE ONLY.

Join us for a conversation with Sylvia Schmelkes, whose talk will explore the politics of educational inequality in Latin America and recount the story of Mexico's short-lived educational evaluation institute, examining its impact, resistance from teachers, and eventual dissolution.

First, Sylvia will present her research project on equity in learning, and will address the fact that educational policy in Latin America is not designed with equity in mind. This is why there are enormous differences, correlated with socioeconomic status, geography, ethnicity and other factors, in access, permanence and learning. Her team’s research project is mapping what they know about the causes of inequality in learning, some of which have to do with the way policy is designed and implemented.

The second issue is the story of a short-lived autonomous institute dedicated to educational evaluation in Mexico. This Institute had as its objectives the evaluation of the educational system (teachers, students, schools and policy), the coordination of the National System of Educational Evaluation, and the formulation of evidence-based policy recommendations. The institute played an important role in developing the norms for teacher evaluation (for entry, promotion and performance), which met with the resistance of teachers and their union. This resistance ultimately led to the dissolution of the Institute during the first semester of the previous administration, with the reform of Article 3 of the Constitution, thus fulfilling a campaign promise of the newly elected President Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Sylvia will share her analysis of the reasons that explain the creation, development and demise of this Institute.

Sylvia Schmelkes is an award-winning sociologist and education researcher. She is currently an Honorary Researcher at Universidad Iberoamericana, Mexico City, where she coordinates the Chair on Educational Justice, named in her honour. She holds a Sociology degree and a Master's in Education Research and Development, from Universidad Iberoamericana.

Since 1970, she has published over 400 works on educational quality, adult learning, values and intercultural education. In 2008, she received the Joan Amos Comenius Medal from the Czech Republic and UNESCO for her contributions to education. She is an Honorary Fellow of the UNESCO Institute of Lifelong Learning and holds three honorary degrees.

Sylvia's past roles include leadership positions at Universidad Iberoamericana, Mexico's Ministry of Education, OECD's Centre for Educational Research and Innovation, and UNESCO's SDGs in Higher Education Expert Group.

This seminar is organised by the Research for Equitable Access and Learning (REAL) Centre and the POLED network at the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge.

The Politics of Education (POLED) network is a student-led special interest group designed to foster critical discourse about the politics of education amongst scholars, practitioners and policy experts. It was set up to explore the role of political economy in addressing the contemporary issues facing education in developing countries.

Host or Publisher Research for Equitable Access and Learning (REAL) Centre at the University of Cambridge