Education of Mexico ¹

Mexico spends 5.9% of its GDP/Capita on education (above average of 5.6%) (2005²)

K12 education system of Mexico ²

12 grades compulsory education instructed in Spanish
- K1: Grade 1-9
- K2: Grade 10-12
- K3: Higher Education/University
Government responsible for providing compulsory K1&K2
- With centralized decision-makings (hiring, firing, teaching content, salary): little local authority
Public schools serve 87 percent of all students in the country
The education system enrolls close to 31 million students (2005²)

Insufficient enrollment
High dropout rates beyond primary level
But schools are underfunded and lack in resources because Mexico is diverse in language
- Tertiary enrollment doubled from 1.9M in 2000 to 4.4M in 2017.
  - But schools couldn’t accomadate them
  - Still much lower numbers of students than other Latin American countries
- Compulsory upper-secondary education plans by the government didn’t help with rural areas
Challenges to Mexico’s Education
- Poverty makes children seek jobs instead of education
  - Lack of educational materials (undefunding)
Problems bad education creates include
- High unempoyment rates among Mexican youths which is twice the unempoyment of overall working age population
  - 2018: 827,324 youths couldn’t find a job, even if 58% of them have middle and higher education
- Issue of brain drain where Mexican students go to US to study the most because bad education in Mexico
  - But that slowed with Trump’s anti-Mexican message
  - Going to other countries
But education is improving rapidly in the larger scope of things
- Illiteracy rates among the population over the age of 15 decreased from 82 percent at the end of the 19th century to less than 5 percent today
- Between 1950 and 2018, enrollments in the formal education system—elementary through graduate education—grew more than 12-fold, from three million to 36.4 million students.
- The tertiary growth enrollment ratio (GER) jumped from 15 percent in 1990 to 38 percent in 2017 (UIS).

4 major national government programs to help with the issue:
1. Oportunidades: cash grants to low-income families
2. Enciclomedia: digitizes school cirriculum into CD-ROMs
3. Programa Escuelas de Calidad: low-performing-schools must reform project for 10k for infrastructure improvements
4. Compensory programs: improving infrastructure, equipment, materials, and incentives for teachers and principles
The government currently collects lots of data on students and the education system, but never release them publicly ². There are a lack of quantitative research on Mexico’s education. The government of Mexico should release data collected on the country’s education system to the public to encourage quantitative research, scientific policy proposals, and academic analysis to find tweaks and reforms capable of improving Mexico’s education system. Although free education is provided to all children of Mexico, 1 million could not study due to transportation cost and supplies needed to attend school ³. Therefore, Mexico must not only build and supply more education facilities for more of the population, it must also address the problem of poverty through employment training or subsidy programs for the poor since these two issues are inter-linked. The issues of clientelism, corruption, and improper use of resources must also be solved by auditing where funds are actually spent, planning efficient use of funding, and lifting the image of ‘state education’.

Question

Does encouraging research in education, through transparency, leads to a better education system?