Mexico's Schools Can't Keep Up
A dire lack of facilities sometimes means that
impoverished parents end up building them.
By Chris Kraul
Times Staff Writer
September 21, 2004
TIJUANA Jorge Alvarado's two-mile walk to middle school takes him
through the Dumping Ground of the Dead. The ravine on the city's
eastern fringes is named for the 15 bodies, mostly victims of this
town's drug wars, that have turned up there in recent years.
His parents are terrified that he'll stumble across a corpse on his way
to school or, worse, witness a killing. But he goes anyway except
during rainy season, when the ravine's unpaved paths can become an
impassable bog.
The 14-year-old runs the gantlet because he has no choice. The
government cannot afford to build a middle school near his home in
Colonia Planicie, one of the poorest slums of a city growing so fast it
is said to be spreading five acres a day.
"I tried to get into another school that is closer and has a library
and a playing field, but there was no room," Jorge said as he and
friends played soccer in the smelly, garbage-strewn ravine one day last
month as the new term was starting.
Jorge's neighborhood is at ground zero of an educational crisis that is
tearing at Mexico's social fabric and economy. Dire shortages of
schools, teachers and government funds, especially acute in Tijuana and
other fast-growing border cities, have left Mexico lagging behind much
of the developed world in learning and are contributing to plagues such
as drug addiction and crime.
The crisis also has implications for Southern California and the rest
of the United States; illegal immigration is at least partly driven by
parents' desire to give their children better educational
opportunities.
Mexico's educational problems have several ugly facets, none more
alarming than the high dropout rate at grade levels such as Jorge's.
Roughly 10% of those who finish elementary school never complete middle
school, either because their parents can't afford to send them, they
drop out to take jobs, or there is simply no place for them.
"There is a bottleneck in the system," said Eduardo Velez Bustillo,
education section manager for Latin America for the World Bank in
Washington. "Quality is bad at every level, but middle school is a
crisis point because that's where the demand is highest."
Although Mexico has made significant strides in recent years in
increasing overall enrollment and public investment in education, the
country still trails other developed nations in most educational
proficiency standards.
In a standardized global evaluation test called the PISA, Mexican
ninth-graders placed 34th among the 41 nations participating in the
exam and last among the 28 member nations in the Organization for
Economic Development and Cooperation. The multinational agency monitors
economic policy among the world's most developed nations.
Other measures, including student hours in class, show Mexico as an
underachiever.
The country is paying a price. Its dysfunctional educational system,
along with corruption, lack of innovation and weak rule of law, has
helped make it increasingly less competitive on the global stage,
meaning it is likely to attract less foreign investment and generate
less trade in the future, said Eduardo Andere Martinez, a Mexico City
researcher and author.
"I see a significant deterioration in competitiveness in Mexico's
future," said Andere, a professor of international studies at Mexico
City's Autonomous Technological Institute. "In social terms, that means
more poverty, more insecurity and more inequality."
Some say the social costs of a poor educational system are already
obvious in Tijuana. Drug addiction rates, especially among women, are
higher in Tijuana than any other city in Mexico, said Jorge Ramos, a
former Tijuana city councilman and unsuccessful mayoral candidate in
last month's election.
The rate of violent crime per capita here is also the highest of any
Mexican city, partly because of a shortage of high schools. Colonia
Mariano Matamoros, which borders Planicie, is short four high schools
to educate the 6,000 youths who must either travel to neighboring
districts or cram into existing schools. Some have dropped out of the
system altogether. "That makes teenage youths susceptible to mischief,"
Ramos said.
Parents in Colonia Planicie and Ciudad Juarez, another border city, are
painfully aware that the country's educational shortcomings threaten
their children's future. Many moved north for jobs at maquiladoras, the
low-paying manufacturing plants that have sprung up in Mexican border
towns, to escape grinding poverty and secure better futures for their
families.
"We want better lives for our children, not the conditions of
backwardness, poverty and ignorance that we live in now. Education is
the basis of progress," Colonia Planicie parent Narcisco Velasco said.
He has sent his two teenagers to live with their grandparents in Mexico
City, where public middle schools are better.
Other parents in Colonia Planicie have assumed what in many countries
would be the government's responsibility building their own schools and
maintaining them. The neighborhood built and paid for its own
elementary school five years ago and got the government to send the
teachers.
Some parents are standing up to the government and paying the price.
This month, police arrested 18 parents in the neighborhood's latest
protest over inadequate schools.
But government officials responsible for public infrastructure can't
cope with Tijuana's population growth estimated at 70,000 new
residents, or 5.9%, a year, three times the growth of the rest of
Mexico. The country is stretched, but especially in Tijuana, making
demands for new schools and other public services nearly impossible to
fill.
In Ciudad Juarez, where high population growth has also overwhelmed the
educational system, 40 schools are under construction to meet
mushrooming demand, said Alfredo Aguirre Carrete, Chihuahua state's
director of basic education for the northern region. But they aren't
enough. Subdivisions are being built so fast, the state can't supply
enough teachers, he said.
"A good example is a subdivision called Los Arcos, where 1,200 houses
have been built since February. People bought houses seeing a school on
the subdivision plan, but encountered a different reality," Aguirre
said. "The houses went up so fast there wasn't time to present a list
of students, which is a requirement for any new school to be built."
"So there wasn't time to get a school approved before the new year, and
so for the time being children are walking two miles to another school
something parents aren't happy about in this time of insecurity,"
Aguirre said.
As in Tijuana, parents in even the poorest neighborhoods of Ciudad
Juarez typically raise their own funds for all public school
improvements and maintenance. Parents at Escuela Manuel Ramos Arispe
somehow manage to raise $10,000 a year to keep it maintained and
equipped in a neighborhood riven by vandalism and gang violence,
principal Andres Hernandez said.
In Ciudad Juarez's Anapra suburb, a colonia of 25,000 people
that has materialized in the high desert almost overnight, parents
built an elementary school using two abandoned buses for classrooms.
Elaine Hampton, a University of Texas-El Paso professor who studies
cross-border education, said that in the absence of Mexican government
resources, the foreign-owned maquiladora factories should help finance
schools in the areas where their workers live.
"Maquiladoras are causing these population shifts, and so are
contributing to the lack of educational infrastructure. But I only
found minimal contributions" by the factories' management, Hampton
said. Some factory managers counter that they make it possible for
workers to complete course work for their high school degrees or
further their technical education while on the job.
In Colonia Planicie, neighbors are prepared to build a new middle
school themselves if the state of Baja California will promise to staff
it with teachers. But the government has refused, saying the
neighborhood's population is too small.
The government has countered with an offer to build a telesecondaria,
something typically built in isolated, often indigenous communities in
southern Mexico or in mountainous areas where teacher access is slight.
Satellite programming airs on video monitors. Forty minutes of on-air
instruction is followed by 20 minutes of discussion led by a docent.
The Mexican government backed up by World Bank studies insists that the
telesecondarias are as effective as traditional schools.
But the parents of Colonia Planicie are having none of it.
"All we ask is that the government send us certified teachers," said
Soledad Perez, a mother of three elementary school students. "We will
do the rest."
Perez was interviewed before the parental protest this month as she
took her turn standing vigil in front of the site where the state
proposes building the telesecondaria.
The parents formed a human chain to keep construction crews out in July
and have also demonstrated in front of the state government building in
Tijuana for a new middle school.
But the state's patience ended Sept. 6, when parents again blocked a
construction crew. Club-wielding police arrived and carted 18 parents
off to jail for impeding construction. They were released two days
later.
"People are in pain," parent Velasco said of his neighbors, many of
whom were nursing wounds they said were caused by police
rough-handling. "But we are not giving up."
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