The Nueva Escuela Mexicana Reform in Mexico: Promises, Prospects and Caveats

• In Event: Educational Reform and Policy in Latin America

Proposal

Purpose and Background:
The study aimed to contextualise the recent education reform–called the Nueva Escuela Mexicana (NEM)–in Mexico within the educational challenges and struggles faced by its people, and to consider whether and in what way the reform may have contributed to addressing them.

The NEM reform could be seen as Mexico’s endeavour to catch up with the ‘turn to the Left’ movement that emerged in Latin America from the late 1990s and early 2000s, which was characterised by a wave of left-leaning governments rejecting neoliberal policies in favour of social justice, equity and state intervention in the economy (Escobar 2010). Under the control of the conservative governments at that time, Mexico initially did not follow this movement occurring in Latin America; Mexican education reforms continued to reflect neoliberal principles accompanied by teacher performance, productivity and accountability (Lozano 2020).

The election of Andrés Manuel López Obrador in 2018, representing one of the major left-wing political parties, marked a significant political shift towards the left in Mexico. Reflecting a departure from the previous neoliberal policies, a series of education reforms, flag shipped by the NEM, have emphasised inclusivity, access and equity, especially for marginalised groups.

This research is one of its first to look at the NEM's perceived experiences and implementation practices–whose implementation began in 2023 – on the ground in Mexico, among others (Tiburcio 2020; Segundo 2024). Two research questions guided the study:1. How do various educational stakeholders in primary schools in three states of Mexico perceive and experience the NEM?;2. What do their perceptions and experiences with the NEM indicate about the reform’s possible prospects and perplexities?

Methods:
Through a mix of snowball and convenience sampling, 12 primary schools in three regions distinctive in terms of socioeconomic levels and indigenous inhabitants–Nuevo Leon in the North, Hidalgo in the Central Region and Chiapas in the South–were visited. Data collection took the form of individual interviews with 44 adult participants (teachers, head teachers and school supervisors) and group interviews with 100 pupils (13 groups) and 25 parents (12 groups), both in semi-structured forms. The researchers asked questions linked to their valued educational outcomes and pedagogies, their views toward the NEM, and their experiences in practising the NEM.

Findings:
Although some interviewees expressed their pride in the roots of Mexican culture before the Spanish arrived, several others indicated that these have been almost lost, exemplified by a school supervisor’s account that ‘Mexicanness is obviously being lost from our patriotic symbols, that many of the fights and tributes have already been lost, that identity is being lost’. Why the Mexican culture was considered to be lost might be partly attributable to the perceived lack of a unified educational grounding that can pass on the Mexican culture to the next generation; many interviewees viewed that education in Mexico had been influenced by other countries and that something ‘Mexican’ did not seem to exist in the educational sphere.

The Nueva Escuela Mexicana (NEM) arrived in such a context of little shared understanding of educational grounding in Mexico to recover the traditions and languages that had been almost extinct. The policy recognises the need to nurture interculturality in children and thus ‘promotes understanding and appreciation of cultural and linguistic diversity’ (SEP 2019, 8). These policy objectives seem to have trickled down to the local policy actors, and several participants considered the NEM as ‘rescuing’ the history and culture of Mexico, which the head teacher in rural Hidalgo regarded as a ‘good’ aspect of the reform. A female teacher in Nuevo Leon similarly thought that the NEM enable ‘children (to) learn to value and rescue these cultures that are part of our tradition’.

To realise the aspect of ‘rescuing cultures’ in everyday classes, the NEM brought community lives and contextualisation of the curriculum and pedagogy to the forefront of its agenda, for which it necessarily granted flexibility and autonomy to the teachers. A head teacher stated that ‘this educational model of focusing on communities and autonomy and freedom, I think, can allow us to attend to diversity’. While many participants embraced the autonomy they got under the NEM, some interviewees expressed concerns regarding too much freedom teachers gained through the NEM. A head teacher in rural Chiapas expressed it as a ‘barrier’ that ‘the Nueva Escuela Mexicana gives us an autonomy that the teacher is not used to’; his fellow teachers were rebellious against the reform.

In addition, the enthusiasm toward the NEM’s emphasis on traditional and indigenous cultures varied depending on the regions; it was more welcomed in the South but less so in the North. The majority of the interviewed stakeholders in Nuevo Leon–where few indigenous peoples resided–saw the NEM as somewhat irrelevant to where they lived. One teacher there revealed that ‘they (the students) obviously don’t find it relevant for them to want to know more [about Indigenous peoples]’; a parent made a similar statement that ‘I feel that this (emphasis on Indigenous communities in the NEM) does not apply so much to Nuevo León’. Such cases may represent what Cardozo (2012) observed as ‘reversed discrimination’ in the context of Bolivia; the education reform espousing decolonising and communitarian education in the country seemed to have left out the non-indigenous population who felt the reform being imposed, ethnocentric and even racist. It is too early to draw any conclusion regarding potentially divided views toward the NEM in terms of reverse discrimination, given that this research took place only a few months after the NEM’s implementation began. Nonetheless, the NEM may still carry the risk of reverse discrimination if it does not recognise the ‘heterogenous space of struggle and contestation’ (Cardozo 2012, 768) extant among diverse cultural regions in Mexico.

In conclusion, with the contextualisation of curriculum and pedagogy, the NEM has put value on traditional cultures and languages in Mexico, which some stakeholders welcomed. However, the reform brought confusion associated with the perceived abundance of teacher autonomy for some teachers. It also seems to manifest a potential danger of reversed discrimination.

Authors

• Nozomi Sakata, Hiroshima University

• Lilia Borquez, UAEMex