CDMX.- As a new school year is about to begin tomorrow, specialists give their assessment of the educational policy of Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s six-year term: spending, enrollment, ranking in evaluations have decreased…
“There has been a regression, a setback in practically every sense,” said Eduardo Backhoff Escudero, former president of the National Institute for the Evaluation of Education (INEE).
In an interview, he said that two of the most important indicators for evaluating a country’s education are enrollment and learning. “This six-year term has achieved what no one else had achieved, which is to reduce enrollment, reduce the number of students and not just the number, the proportion of students who attend school,” he said.
According to SEP data, when the current President took office, in the 2018-2019 school year, there were 35.8 million students registered at all levels in the country. In the last reported period (2023-2024), the number of students was 34.8 million.
“It’s something we hadn’t seen in other six-year terms. Enrollment had always been on the rise and not on the decline. On the one hand, it’s the pandemic, but it’s already gone down, or it’s already over. It’s the most important indicator of all and it’s the one in which we’ve gone backwards,” he added. He considered that the elimination of educational evaluations during the six-year term – which had three Secretaries of Education – was a terrible decision. “We lost the way of knowing how badly we’ve done, or of being able to monitor the course of the national education system, and we only have one evaluation left, which is PISA (which also had the risk of stopping), which is done every three years, but only with 15-year-old students,” he explains. In the PISA 2022 test, Mexico obtained its worst result in the last 16 years. In addition, according to specialists, the share of educational spending on the total programmable spending of the federal government fell by almost two percentage points. In 2018, it represented 17.5 percent and in 2023 it closed at 15.7 percent. Meanwhile, Marco Fernández, a researcher at México Evalúa and Tec de Monterrey, warns that the scholarship support did not yield progress for what it was intended: to combat school dropouts and lag. “And this is because, before the pandemic, during and after it, the authorities never worried about strengthening teacher support or creating tutoring programs that could prevent these students who were receiving scholarships from dropping out of school,” he adds. He also points out that scholarship support has not increased among lower-income students, as it should be.
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