GOING into the offices of the National Co-ordinator of Education Workers (CNTE) in Oaxaca, a city 350km (220 miles) south-east of Mexico’s capital, is like entering a world of rebellious teenagers rather than teachers. Graffiti are scrawled on the walls and posters denounce “state terrorism”. The trade union’s radio station, Radio Plantón (Demonstration Radio), rails against President Enrique Peña Nieto’s education reforms, which it blames on the IMF and other capitalist bogeymen.
In the main square nearby, the CNTE’s Oaxaca chapter, known as Section 22, maintains a campsite occupied by teachers not a bit repentant about abandoning their classrooms for weeks on end. Drivers have adopted a pragmatic response to the teachers’ frequent road blocks: they use a GPS app called, appropriately, S-22 to avoid them. The state government is just as anxious to keep out of the way. It is wary of a repeat of a crisis in 2006, when a teachers’ strike turned into a violent rebellion that shut down parts of the city for months.
This is not a local affair, however. The CNTE, which is smaller but far more aggressive than Mexico’s main teachers’ union, the SNTE, holds sway over four of Mexico’s most unruly states, Oaxaca, Guerrero, Michoacán and Chiapas, which contain about 15% of the population. All have large concentrations of indigenous people. Using a mixture of intimidation and political skill, the union is trying to knock down one of the pillars of Mr Peña’s government: a transformation of education that is central to a series of reforms aimed at making Mexico a more competitive economy.
Despite its crude methods, in part it is succeeding. “If they give in to these guys, they are giving in to counter-reform and corruption,” says Claudio X. González, president of Mexicanos Primero, a charity that champions education reform. Last month he sent a letter to the government accusing it of endangering reform—and the rule of law—by bowing to the demands of the CNTE. He says that blows to Mr Peña’s credibility, such as the disappearance of 43 students in September and scandals over his family’s properties, have weakened his government’s resolve to confront the dissident teachers.
The reform of 2013 is aimed at boosting the quality of education in a country that Mexicanos Primero says gives children an average of 8.8 years of study, compared with 13.3 in the United States. As in much of Latin America, most schools are awful. Graduates of teacher-training colleges have been promised jobs for life, regardless of their performance. According to PISA, a global education study, less than a fifth of Mexican students performed adequately in maths in 2012, compared with more than three-quarters in South Korea. Private schools are little improvement on public ones; the poorest children in Canada do better than the richest in Mexico.
Mr Peña is getting tough with teachers, who earn, with copious benefits, the equivalent of 513.6 days of salary for 200 days of school, according to Marco Antonio Fernández of the Monterrey Technological Institute’s School of Government. His reform exposes them for the first time to independent evaluation, both at entry level and further up the career ladder. Those who miss three consecutive days of school without good reason can be sacked.
The reform has also centralised payments of salaries at federal level, in an effort to end a ludicrous anomaly by which both central and state governments paid teachers, though neither knew how many there were. The reform is supposed to streamline spending, and use the savings to improve education. Largesse continues nonetheless, and unionised teachers still hold powerful positions in national and state education ministries and in Congress. This year’s federal budget increases spending on teachers’ pay by 6.7%
Imperfect as it may be, pollsters say the education reform is far more popular nationwide than others promoted by Mr Peña, such as bringing competition into the monopolistic energy and telecoms businesses. That is particularly true in the industrialised states in central and northern Mexico, where PISA scores are already well above the national average (see map). They see better education as a way to attract more investment. The moderate SNTE largely supports the reforms, and is implementing them in most states.
In the south, where reform is needed most, resistance is strongest. Teachers there say what they need is electricity, running water and toilets, not evaluations. In Oaxaca and Michoacán, CNTE-affiliated teachers have forbidden inspectors, including those from PISA, to test pupils, let alone themselves. Mohamed Otaqui, the spokesman for Section 22, says the union has successfully blocked the Oaxaca state government from ratifying the constitutional changes. Instead, it wants to enact a local policy rooted in indigenous values, rather than in those of an industrial economy. These include better use of the land, and respect for traditions such as village fiestas.
Despite its extremism, the union has got its way by threatening ruinous blockades if its demands are not met. It has won open support from Oaxaca’s leftist state government. Moisés Robles Cruz, the state’s education secretary, challenges the assumption that Mexico’s industrial north and poorer south can be united under a common education policy. His area, he says, is too underdeveloped. Only partly in jest, he pulls out a one-peso banknote printed in Oaxaca a century ago, when the state was pressing for autonomy during the Mexican revolution. “I may not be in agreement with [the teachers’] methods, but [their] causes are totally legitimate,” he says.
Such statements ought to be a red rag to the federal government. The education minister, Emilio Chuayffet, declares that all children should have the same opportunities and that no state is above the law. But with mid-term elections approaching in June, the interior ministry is handling the crisis, implying that political dealmaking will win out over policy. Last month Oaxaca’s teachers occupied the main road in Mexico City to press their claims. Analysts say that they have shrewdly outmanoeuvred the government by forcing it to pay perhaps 5,000 extra school staff, probably including union officials who should not have been on the payroll.
If militant unions can so easily undermine reform by threatening havoc, so may moderate teachers, who still wield huge influence in the states. Vested interests threatened by Mr Peña’s other reforms will also be tempted to counter-attack. Sadly for Oaxaca’s children, that is probably the most important lesson the CNTE will teach this year, unless the government stands up for what it believes in.