This past week I gave my second and third year Junior High students what I considered to be an easy test which was to serve as a culmination of our first unit on numbers, family member vocabulary, basic phrases and days of the week. The results were shocking – the majority of the class failed. While there were a handful of students who scored exceptionally on the test, at the opposite end of the spectrum some students received grades as low as 10 %. Although I used a curve and awarded half points, their achievement was so low that the majority of the class scored bellow 60%. While these substandard results truly astounded me, I should have known better as I have read a plethora of articles and reports detailing the extremely low quality public education in rural Mexico.
As for public education in Mexico goes, the overall quality is devastatingly low. According to a study conducted by RAND Corporation, as of 2005 the Mexican government was spending 5.9 percent of the total GDP, on public education. These numbers are bleak when compared to the 8 percent of GDP suggested by the United Nations Education Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) as the minimum amount that developing countries should invest in education. RAND Corporation also notes that when compared to other developing countries which are part of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), Mexico’s annual public education expenditure per-pupil (1,305 USD) ties with the Slovak Republic for last place. As a result of this dire lack of funding, Mexico’s public education is in shambles as Mexican students sore far bellow other Latin American students in international achievement tests. While the public education system is extremely poor, some students fare worse than others… and in Mexico the most marginalized students are those living in rural communities. Please take a look at the following chart detailing the discrepancies between rural and urban achievement levels.
What accounts for these much lower achievement levels is a combination of factors such as lack of funding, high rates of teacher absenteeism, poor quality teachers and lack of a communal or familial emphasis on education. The statistics speak volumes for the lamentable rural education phenomenon as average rural schooling totals a mere 4.3 years while the average Mexican holds 7.9 years of schooling. In addition, while 55.6 percent of the rural population has obtained only a primary education, 22 percent of the rural population has no education at all. Only two percent of the rural population has entered into higher education (RAND).
Unfortunately, the students of Ziquitaro are living this sad reality. While their tests scores alluded to the poor quality of their education system, it was the simple survey I gave the following day which made me realized how limited their educational opportunities are. Extremely disappointed in their performance on the tests I asked each student to respond in Spanish to two simple questions written in Spanish: 1. Do you think it is important to go to school, why or why not? 2. Do you think that it is important to study, why or why not? It was not their answers which shocked me but their grammar as the majority of the students had major errors in their answers. There were even a few answers which were unintelligible as most words were spelled phonetically rather than grammatically. One of the most telling responses attempted to answer “It is important to go to school in order to not be illiterate (analfabetismo)”, yet the majority of the sentence was rendered unintelligible due to improper grammar and spelling. Thus it took me a few minutes to figure out what the student was trying to write.
In addition to the school being a “TV Junior high” (see town profile) a myriad of other problems haunt the students. For example, when I arrive at school teachers are often not in their classrooms and even off campus. This past Friday I arrived to my first year class only to find the teacher missing once again. When I asked where she was the students informed me that she had gone to the nearby town in order to “look at property for sale”. As a result the kids left school after my class, and thus only attended school for a measly 2 hours. Due to teacher absenteeism lunch often drags on for hours. In addition, around five to eight students are kicked out of school each day for petty offences such as “wearing too much makeup”. As a result they wander the streets. And finally, there is little emphasis on education in the community as work and ultimately migration is often seen more lucrative and realistic than the long road through academia.
This situation has presented me with a very difficult roadblock for in order to progress with the classes I need the students to pay attention in class and study after class so that they retain the basic information. In an attempt to mold the situation I have acted in a few ways. First, I gave the students an opportunity to raise their grades by bringing me their tests completely corrected. In addition, Michel and I gave an hour long presentation to each class regarding education and its correlation to poverty, immigration and the quality of life in the Mexico and the US. We used a lot of concrete stats to paint a vivid picture of the difficult life that awaits them in Mexico and the US if they turn their backs to their studies. I can not progress with the classes until the students learn the most basic material, thus another test on the same subject matter will be given on Tuesday. The kids know that this is their chance to show me that they are interested in their futures, so we will see how they do.
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