Fri Mar 29, 2024
March 29, 2024

The Public Edcucation Struggle is International: Full Support to the CNTE!

Peña Nieto’s government has been trying to impose an “Education Reform” for 3 years now, which is actually the combination of a labour reform against the CNTE teachers and an attempt to privatize the public education. For it, he has used all the methods of a dictatorial and bloody government like Assad’s. Since the disappearance of the 43 students of the Normal School while they were struggling for public education in Ayotzinapa in 2014, until the murder of the 11 activists of the CNTE and members of the Nochixtlán community by the police, to Peña Nieto “it is all valid” to attack the people and criminalize the teachers.

By Blanca Missé – Committee of Public Education of Bay Area Committee – Convey Against Repression

 

In the US as much as in Mexico, the CNTE teachers’ struggle is symbolic and strategic, as it confronts a neo-liberal plan that is being prepared for years now in the core of the imperialism, and it got to mobilize hundreds of thousands of teachers, parents and students, as well as to link them to other sectors in struggle, awakening popular sympathy and showing the Mexican people and workers that “if we struggle together, we can do it”.

An “Education Reform” that attacks workers and looks to privatize the education

Although Peña Nieto’s government continues to call the reform an “educational reform”, we know it is more like “anti-educational”. Like the teacher and leader of the CNTE (Section IX), Francisco Bravo, says, this reform is “an imposition of transnational financial organisms like the Organization for the Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the World Bank (WB) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), trying to impose market values to the education and deprive it of all humanist nature”, as it imposes an education model based in “concepts and schemes of the business world, like skills development, effectiveness, efficiency, quality, etc.; in most of the countries where this vision was imposed, there is a major privatization process and an educational failure, with a high social and teachers’ discontent (for example, in Chile)”.

The reform looks to impose a mandatory and recurrent system of evaluation of teachers that does not aim to evaluate the quality of education but to allow easy layoffs and the repression of the political and unionist activity of the CNTE teachers. The evaluation systems aims to link the hiring process, the promotion and the permanency of the teachers to an evaluation following a criteria that has no real educational or pedagogic content. The erosion of the teachers’ labour rights will do nothing but aggravate the real problems of Mexican public education.

Besides, the reform has an open structural neo-liberal nature, as it opens the door to privitize the eduaction, “charter” model style as already implemented in the US, where the State unlinks progresively of the integral and equal financiation of schools to, instead, 1) strengthening the “management autonomy” of each school, making the students, teachers and parents responsible for improving the infrastructure, buying manuals and school supplies, and 2) opening the door to outsourcing educational services to private companies. It has been more than proven that the foundation “Mexicans First”, led by the multinational Televisa, in collaboration with OCDE and the IMF, are behind the “reform” project since its beginning. Several independent sources have shown the interests of private groups and multinationals and the corruption networks, which encourage this educational reform, and of the “Pact for Mexico”, encouraged by the PRI [Institutional Revolutionary Party], the PAN [National Action Party] and the PRD [Democratic Revolution Party].

The “Pact for Mexico” is nothing but a plan to impose anouther round of neo-liberal reforms, or “structural” austerity, to the Mexican people and workers: more privatizations, less rights, more misery, less public services, etc. A scandalous case, among others, are the links between the business interests behind the link between the Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education and the allocations of the teachers’ “education” process to this private center, through conexions with agents of the Public Education Secretary [SEP].

The CNTE teachers defend education for the people and Peña Nieto`s government represses them violently

The CNTE teachers and Normal School students have been fighting for more than 3 years now against the “educational reform”. This struggle is not only to defend their work conditions (therefore, the material conditions for learning), but also a struggle to keep the education public and focused on the people, against a private and business model Peña Nieto wants to impose.

In response to this democratic and legitimate struggle, Peña Nieto’s government and his business allies have launched, first, a national campaign to discredit the teachers, calling them lazy, “jerks”, incompetent and “privileged”. The goal of this campaign was to destroy any kind of solidarity and identification with the teachers’ struggle as a popular workers’ struggle.

The newspaper La Jornada [The Journey] recently published an excelent interview, very illustrative, with a Mixteco teacher, Daniel López Castellanos, who works in rural zones in Chiapas, near the border with Guatemala, telling about his “privileges” ($4.300 Mexican pesos biweekly, so US$215 dollars). This interview shows really well the role of the teachers in the poor urban, rural and indigenous communities: “Daniel is radically opposed to the educational reform because it implies loosing the base number of spots. Also because, according to him, with the new reform the teachers will have to supress the time destined to co-live with the community, visit the students’ houses and give them personalized attention. Now the teachers will not be concerned about the children learning or not. To not loose their jobs, they will have to concentrate in passing an exam.

Daniel is outraged because the teachers are being accused of opposing the reform to defend miserable privileges. ‘I recall –he says- Emilio Chuayffet’s statement denouncing the teachers earned between 20 and 30 thousand Mexican Pesos, and who did not make that much is because they bought their title. I am a licensed teacher; thanks to Mactumatzá I have a professional title, I was hired by the SEP. And when I started working I earned $600 pesos’”.

To the rural teacher Daniel López Castellanos, the only privilege he actually has, the biggest of all, is to be part of the community and have the satisfaction of watching the children learn. “That is when you say –he points out-: yes, everything I am doing is worth it. This is the real privilege the alleged ‘educational reform’ wants to take from us”.

But seing the discredit campaign was not enough, the government released all possible and imaginable State violence. The more frightening episode was, obviously, the dissapearance, torture and murder of the 43 students in Ayotzinapa. But that was not an isolated case; the CNTE teachers have been violently repressed.

Many teachers have been murdered in pickets and confrontations, hundreds have been arrested and imprisoned illegally, particularly during last summer, when the Federal Police arrested two of the main leaders of the National Coordinatotion (Rubén Núñez Ginés y Francisco Villalobos Ricárdez) to impose by force the end of the strike. In June, the intervention of the Police and the Army in Nochixtlán (Oaxaca) left 11 more death people by the State. The Peña Nieto’s government is imposing the reform by blood and fire. In August, it dismissed hundreds of teachers on strike in Ciudad de México. All the methods seem to be valid for the government, thus it is important to build the greatest unity with the teachers, to repudiate the refom and the dictatorial methods used to impose it.

To defend the public education in the US and Mexico: same enemy, same struggle

Luckily and unfortunately, both Mexican and US teachers and students have the same fate. The educational reform of Peña Nieto was not thought by him, he just implements, uncovered, the same “philosophy” and the same commercial, privatizing project of the latest reforms in the US.

The reform No Child Left Behind, decreed by Bush in 2001 and renewed in its escence and content by Obama in 2015 already contains the philosophy of standarized tests and evaluations to students that only consider formal skills and not critical thinking neither solidarity and humanitarian attitudes. The schools are evaluated and receive (or stop receveing) federal budget according to the results of these tests, which has only caused an increase of inequeality between different scholar districts (class differences that clearly mix with racial discrimination, as the poor districts of black and Latin majority receive less money). The government has transformed the public school into an instrument of reproduction of the social inequality.

Also, the US government has been trying to privatize the State System of Public Universities -like the University of California, the California State University or the New York State University- for over ten years. And this was after dismantling the public university in Michigan state during the ‘90s. It does it by cutting public budget, not renewing the spots for teachers, brutally increasing the tuitions, cutting labour rights, making contracts with private companies, etc.

But the bonds between Peña Nieto and Obama’s governments go beyond this bi-party, bi-national political unity (PRI and PAN, DP and RP) on policies to privatize the education. We need to consider the growing capacity of Peña Nieto to repress Normal School students, teachers of the CNTE and other social activists, is directly linked to the Plan Mexico (Mérida Initiative) through which the US provides military supplies, training and wide logistical support to the Mexican Army and Police Forces. On the other hand, there are the US multinationals, looking to turn the education into a merchancy of which a few can take benefit from, by expropriating it and ending its nature of collective good. Those companies are the ones rubbing their hands thinking of the major benefits they will take out of the privatizations in Mexico.

For all these reasons, the struggle of the CNTE teachers is so important to students, teachers and professors in the US, and that is why the Unions of Public Education and the students’ movements in the US must express solidarity and their committment to unify the struggle: if we defeat one, it will be easier to defeat the others. And the other way around, if the CNTE teachers achieve a victory with the support of unions and students in the US, our labour rights and public education will strengthen.

No to the education reform of Peña Nieto!

No to the privatization of the public education!

For a free, qualified, workers’, indigenous and popular public education!

Full support to the CNTE!

Students, teachers and communities: let us unify our struggles both sides of the border!

***

Translation: Sofia Ballack.

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