Abstract
The 2013 education reform to Mexico’s education system had two main goals, one explicit, to improve the quality of education and one implicit, to reassert federal authority over the education sector. Beginning with institutional and political mechanisms that introduced evaluations to the teaching profession, the reform sought a shift in Mexican educational culture.
This chapter will begin by analyzing Mexico in international and domestic contexts to understand the urgency of the reform. It will then use Reimers (2020b and 2020c) five perspectives on education change to analyze the reform and evaluate the sequence in which it was implemented. The chapter concludes by outlining the results of the reform to date and summarizing the relationship between the five perspectives. Ultimately, we argue that the initial deprioritization of technical aspects, including pedagogical and curricular ones, stymied the cultural shift towards an educational model grounded in twenty-first century competencies that the reform sought. When coupled with a limited political cycle and uneven implementation at a state level, the reform’s sequence left little time for full implementation of its more pedagogical aspects, such as the new education model, and ultimately faced dramatic reprisal from the new presidential administration.
The Editor’s Note