By Kathleen Bohne
Below you will find an excerpt from the August 21 edition of “La Semana” newsletter. To read the complete article and subscribe, please visit www.themexpatriate.com
“Hay muchos Méxicos.”
There may be no more stark distinction among these “many Mexicos” today than in their educational experience. When students were sent home in March 2020 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, no one anticipated that schools would remain closed in Mexico for 18 months, one of the longest periods of closure in the world. While the policy was mandated for private and public institutions alike, families who attended the former (approximately 11.4 percent of the school-age population) often had the resources and wherewithal to provide their children in-person instruction. In the fall of 2020 and into the following year, as small private schools went “underground” to avoid closure by the authorities and public school students remained at home—or in many cases, entered the labor force—the restaurants, bars and hotels re-opened. This public health policy calculus did not mitigate the transmission or lethality of the virus in the population. Mexico’s excess mortality from Jan 2020-Dec 2021 made it the worst affected in the OECD, with one of the highest excess death rates in the world.
This week brought education into the headlines as the director of the Department of Public Education (SEP), Delfina Gómez, announced she would step down to focus on her election campaign in the governor’s race in Estado de México in 2024. Her replacement, Leticia Ramírez, has been working closely with President López Obrador for decades but her last year teaching in a classroom was in 1984. Ramírez inherits a department that faces its most profound crisis in recent memory. An estimated 500,000 students have abandoned school as of data from June 2022, and 738,000 never completed the 2019-20 school year. The SEP budget has contracted an average of 1.5 percent yearly from 2019-22. Data on the true depth and breadth of the impact is auspiciously absent. Private school enrollment had the sharpest declines, but it is unclear how many of these students moved over to public schools. The SEP has long struggled to provide even basic data on its schools and their student rosters and this data desert is now making it difficult to properly assess the damage.
What analysts and researchers can determine is that the setbacks have been most acute in poorer, rural areas that already suffered from scarce resources and dilapidated infrastructure. Many schools were looted and vandalized. Teachers and parents in these communities shouldered the burden of trying to continue children’s education on their own: scraping together money to pay for copies of materials that teachers cobbled together, struggling with internet access to log on to classes. In the limited series podcast “Crecer en Distopía” (Growing up in Dystopia) released a year ago, teachers described the reality of remote learning in a system abysmally underprepared for this challenge and in a country where access to technology is still limited amongst the marginalized. I don’t usually tear up listening to podcasts, but in every episode of this one, there was a lump in my throat. “In some communities, teachers have taken to trying to teach children in open spaces with a megaphone, or by driving around in a pick-up truck,” says a teacher interviewed in Oaxaca. “Many of the parents here work in informal jobs and so they spend over half the day at work. My students are left in the care of siblings, grandparents. There are intense situations of domestic violence.”
Depression and suicide rates in minors have escalated, as has also been observed in the US in the past two years. In 2020 alone, suicides in 10-14 year-old children increased by 37 percent compared to 2019 in Mexico, and a total of 1,150 minors under age 18 took their own lives. There have been 957 confirmed COVID-19 deaths in the same population (under 18) in over two years of the pandemic.
Families and teachers have also witnessed other emotional and psychological disturbances in students. “It is indispensable that the diagnosis includes socio-emotional conditions…including lack of socialization, trauma from loss of family members, the involuntary entry into the workforce, early acquisition of responsibilities at home or exposure to violent behaviors in their environment,” noted researchers in an overview of the educational crisis in Nexos. Students with special needs have also been left behind. According to an analysis by Mexicanos Primero, only 40 percent of the budget allotted to special needs education has been applied this year, and cuts were made in funding support of public special educational services.
The return to classes in the 2021-22 school year was uneven and interrupted frequently by outbreaks that sent students and teachers back home to isolate. While the federal government finally prioritized the return to in-person classes, states were left on their own to manage most of the protocols and logistics. Some states decided to wait longer to re-open their schools. In April 2022, the SEP published a survey of teachers conducted in January-February to assess how far students were lagging behind. In this cursory evaluation, 46 percent of teachers responded that students showed high or very high learning deficits. The solution (to an under-acknowledged problem) was to extend the school year by 42 days and to lower grading thresholds to make it impossible to “fail” students. Unfortunately, teachers were not given clear guidelines on how to make use of the extra time in school (end-of-year exams had already taken place) and while it seems reasonable not to “penalize” students after 18 months of intermittent instruction by failing them, this further muddies the panorama of educational evaluation. Are these students prepared to move on to the next grade? In an analysis conducted by the Centro de Estudios Espinosa Yglesias, it is estimated that Mexican students lost between 1.3-2.1 school years of learning “with respect to the expected learning attainment.”
