Protest and Compliance: Curriculum Reform in Mexico

• In Event: Examining Public Policies, Curriculums, and Programs across the educational ecosystem in the LAC region

Proposal

In Mexico, the National Union of Education Workers (SNTE) has been a powerful corporatist body since its founding by the state in 1946. With the Department of Public Education (SEP), the SNTE oversight effectively co-governs the basic education system. Although certain factions protest new educational policies, its leadership and most of its members generally follow the government initiatives, especially during the single-party regime of the Mexican Revolution, which survived until 2000, and with the National Action Party (PAN) governments from 2000 to 2012. However, the clique that controlled the organs of government disputed the ambitious education reform of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) government that retook the presidency in 2012. The dispute was so intense that the government of then President Enrique Peña Nieto imprisoned Elba Esther Gordillo, head of the clique since 1989, in February 2013 (Ornelas, 2018).
Meanwhile, the primary dissident faction, the National Coordinating Committee of Education Workers (CNTE), with strong bases in the poorest and most backward Mexican states, has consistently protested the government reforms since its founding in 1979. As Susan Robertson notes in her invitation letter to CIES 2024, “The power of protest in education lies in the fact that it is, by definition, a public act. Protest allows people facing injustice to generate power through collective action.” In effect, the CNTE has accumulated power and maintains its strategy of opposition to the formal leaders of the SNTE and the presidents in office. Nobody has yet to be able to conquer or co-opt it (Ornelas, 2019).
However, in Robertson's words, “the nature of protest is always bound up in political claims about what is 'right' and 'just' to begin with”. In this paper, I argue that the reasons for teachers' union protests in Mexico are often unfair. It is a power struggle between kaleidoscopic factions in the SNTE and bureaucratic agencies (within the state) that manipulate teachers, students, and the school system for their ends.
I will base my argument on historical scrutiny and build an analytical apparatus based on power theorists, such as Niccolò Machiavelli (2003) and Max Weber (2014), and contemporary authors who analyze educational policy from a comparative perspective, such as Michael Apple (2014), Martin Carnoy (1974, 1984), Bradley Levinson (et al., 2020), Tomas Popkewitz (2021), and Susan Robertson (2021).
To empirically document the storyline, I will focus on the contest over the curriculum in the governments of Enrique Peña Nieto (EPN) (2012-2018) and Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) (2018-2024). The former promoted a reform with neoliberal inputs coming from the OECD. It instituted the Professional Teaching Service as an instrument to discipline teachers and promote a curriculum emphasizing the whole student (Guevara et al., 2015). The second advances with a proposal that claims a humanist and decolonial philosophy are their intellectual and moral bases. It highlights the community (Dirección General de Materiales Educativos, 2023). I will systematically compare both projects of curricular change, their sources of theoretical inspiration, and the role played by the two factions of the SNTE.
I will support my argument based on a literature review, an extensive account of newspaper articles, editorial comments, and a few interviews with prominent actors and file and rank teachers.
The central issue of this paper goes to the heart of the CIES 2024 theme, the power of protest, but also analyzes its opposite, the power of compliance.

Author

• Carlos Ornelas, Universidad Autonoma Meropolitana