Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto’s 2013 education reform essentially put the blame for the failings of Mexican education on teachers and subjected all educational personnel to tests that could end their careers if not passed. Author C.E. Flores, in this 2015 article, describes her first-hand experience with the educational system that the AMLO government has inherited.

The last Friday of every month during the school year…is the dreaded CTE (Consejo Technico Educativo) meeting for teachers…a direct result of recent educational reforms passed into law by the esteemed Mexican President Peña Nieto. In theory, additional teacher training is a good idea. After all, the Mexican educational system definitely has room for improvement. But…

The CTE forum is based on a teacher training program used in Chile, modified to suit the Mexican government’s agenda. Instead of open and frank discussion and problem-solving, the content of the CTE meetings is carefully orchestrated by the Ministry of Public Education. Each meeting is to focus on a reglamento (statute) and there is no room for individual school differences based on the assumption that the teachers, students, and schools in Oaxaca and those in Mexico D.F. are equal in every way. Everybody must be on the same page as the program progresses…

One teacher described the situation in this allegory paraphrased below:

The government has seen that our students are in an educational “bus” that is in poor condition…The shocks are gone, the brakes don’t work, the steering wheel is loose, the floor is rusted through and so on. The government sees that our children take this bus over a rough road, hardly even a road, full of dangerous curves, holes, steep cliffs and so on (Mexican society). So the government’s solution to this is to take the driver of the bus (the teacher), give him a new suit, a fancy cap, train him to fly planes even. Then, after all that specialized training, put him back in the same bus that runs over the same road. 

After his 2018 election, AMLO scrapped Peña Nieto’s education reform and repealed the so-called “merit-based” structuring of salaries and promotions. AMLO also extended access to free higher education among the country’s most impoverished students. But critics charge that the AMLO government has done little for the critical lower grades. Average Mexican teacher salaries still hover at only 25 percent of the average US teacher salary.