Evaluación de la sensibilidad en los núcleos segmentados

It is not our intention to explore the often meticulously prepared and crafted in- service training programmes for practising teachers, advisors, evaluators and administrators whose pedagogy in the majority of cases is based on the principle of learning as problem-solving. Our aim is to look at the way institutional derangements can distort or even prevent such courses, programmes and workshops from being effective and, in some cases, from taking place. The fault is not in the design or the commitment of the designers but in the incoherent, contradictory and paralysing sys- tem of delivery that we have referred to previously.

The origins of in- service training lie in attempts to consolidate and regularize the expansion of education that took place during the 1930s, in part, through the mobilization and enthusiasm of the Socialist Education Movement. By the 1940s the education authorities were con- fronted with the double problem of developing a qualified and expand- ing corps of teachers and bringing what they saw as institutional order into educational programmes and institutions. Many practising and committed teachers particularly in rural areas had few if any formal qualifications; these teachers had played an active part in the Socialist Education Movement that they viewed as an extension of the political revolution. They aspired to provide coverage throughout the country in line with one of the key promises of the revolution. These largely self- taught and highly motivated teachers, reminiscent of organizations like

the nineteenth- century Irish hedge schools and the teachers’ brigades that were organized in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, worked impossibly long days. In the morning, they taught children in whatever premises could be commandeered given the lack of school buildings and facilities. In the afternoon, they organized and fronted adult literacy programmes for parents and at weekends, they arranged special courses largely designed to provide women with the knowledge, skills and dis- positions to take their rightful place as producers in and full members of the community. For these teachers, learning how to read and write was inseparable from aspiring to a new social order, and their texts and classes were built round encouraging their students to develop their own views. In brief, they sought to imbue literacy and the vocational with political awareness and expression. However, this came into conflict with the Partido de la Revolución Mexicana (PRM) that saw itself as the sole arbiter of what should be, and how it should be, taught.

In formal terms these teachers were largely unqualified. It was estimated that in 1941 76 per cent of teachers in the federal system and 86 per cent of rural teachers were without training. In 1945 only 50 per cent of existing teachers had finished primary school, only 19 per cent had entered the secondary system and only another 19 per cent had suc- cessfully trained at rural teacher- training institutions (see also Santillán, 2012). The matter of control that so worried the PRM was put firmly on the agenda in 1940 when General Manuel Ávila Camacho succeeded the more socially minded and innovative Lázaro Cárdenas to the presi- dency. Ávila Camacho described teachers who participated in politics as ‘outlaws’. A  campaign of ‘regularization’ was launched which in 1942 led to the establishment of the Escuela Normal Superior de México as a four- year post- upper secondary and teacher-training establishment. As Marcela Santillán (2012, 46) has pointed out, here the tendency was to concentrate less on the quality of academic training than ‘to control the political participation of the teaching profession’ and educate teachers to be ‘technicians of instruction’. This objective was further elaborated on by the then Minister of Education, Jaime Torres Bodet. His idea was to rein in the activities of the teachers. The aim of these establishments, he maintained, was to equip teachers with ‘ . . . a series of useful and sim- ple rules, some simple formulae to learn and retain in order to improve their techniques and provide advice about physical and moral health’ (Santillán, 2012, 46).

To that effect, in 1945 he set up the Instituto Federal de Capacitación del Magisterio to offer correspondence courses leading to certification. Over the years it became apparent that teachers were receiving a poor

education at the teacher-training colleges. This led to the establishment of the multi- campus Universidad Pedagógica Nacional (UPN) in 1978, which was set up, in part at the behest of the teachers’ trade union, to grant degrees in education and to serve as a model and a yardstick. According to official figures (see also Secretaría de Educación Pública, 2014), between 1940 and 1952 the number of teachers increased by just under 67 per cent and the number of schools by just under 16 per cent. Moreover, the ministry had little knowledge of the teachers they employed and of their trainers in the training colleges. As a first step, it was decided to gather information. Hence, somewhat belatedly in 1954 the Junta Nacional de Educación Normal was asked to undertake a gen- eral review of the system, gather profiles of the teachers and revise teach- ing programmes.

Whilst considerable attention was given to the curriculum for teacher training between 1942 and 1972, as Isaias Alvarez (2002) points out, the piecemeal approach to in- service training continued. In 1971 the Dirección General de Mejoramiento Profesional del Magisterio (later called the Dirección General de Capacitación y Mejoramiento Profesional del Magisterio (DGMPM)) was created to upgrade the teachers in pre- primary, primary and secondary schools. Despite the efforts of this new institution, sufficient funds were not made available to allow it to develop sufficient courses to fill the gap. In the same year an educational research centre, the Departamento de Investigaciones Educativas (DIE), was set up as part of the Centro de Investigación y de Estudios Avanzados del Instituto Politécnico Nacional (CINESTAV) under the leadership of Juan Manuel Gutiérrez Vásquez and Olac Fuentes Molinar. It too was at first unable to obtain support to combine research with learning. Many of the staff led by Gutiérrez Vásquez therefore worked with non- governmental institutions.

That is, in- service programmes were not given a high priority, until in 1984 the government decreed that all entrants to teacher-training colleges had to have a school- leaving certificate as a result of the 1982 decision to upgrade the status of teacher-training schools to that of higher education institutions. The suddenness of this new requirement meant that enrolment declined precipitously. Only after the event within the labyrinthine components of the ministry was it suggested that the absence of relevant in- service programmes could have lessened or even prevented a shortage of qualified teachers. As Marcela Santillán (2012) commented, the administration and organization could not cope with their existing responsibilities and duties let alone take on new ones. It was not until 1989, as a result of what was called a national consultation

for the modernization of education, that in- service training was placed firmly on the agenda. The consultation in its recommendations con- cluded by stating that there was a pressing need to establish a pertinent, efficient and permanent system for in- service training.

Meanwhile, so severe was the problem of retention that divisions of the ministry such as curriculum development stepped in and began to provide short programmes in areas of expertise in order to update the skills of teachers and provide them with new pedagogic methods. Liaison between the federal government, the states and most stakeholder organi- zations was so poor at this stage that to do this it was necessary to cre- ate an unofficial network of advisors throughout the country to override existing institutions. For example, an effective network of mathematicians set up programmes with the help of well- established research organiza- tions like the Departamento de Investigaciones Educativas (DIE) of the Centro de Investigación y de Estudios Avanzados del Instituto Politécnico Nacional (CINESTAV) led by Eugenio Filloy Yagüe, Elisa Bonilla Rius and Hugo Balbuena Corro in the SEP. Something more permanent than dependence on individuals was required.

For this reason, three years later in 1992 the recommendations of the 1989 consultation exercise led to the establishment of a cur- riculum to develop existing staff through the Programa Emergente de Actualización del Magisterio and the Programa de Actualización de Maestros. Despite the relatively short life of these programmes, for the first time they laid the basis for the construction of a national policy. In 1994, after the signing of the Acuerdo Nacional para la Modernización de la Educación Básica and after an agreement on how to share respon- sibilities between the federal and state ministries of education, the SEP and the SNTE fleshed out the basic guidelines of the Programa Nacional para la Actualización Permanente de los Maestros de Educación Básica (PRONAP). In essence, whilst each state was to be responsible for the planning and administration of education, the federal government still retained full control over the curriculum, and hence continued to inter- vene at all levels in its delivery. In 1995, with the signing of a series of agreements between the federal government and the states along these lines, the PRONAP came into effect.

It led to the creation of teachers’ centres in states where they had not previously existed. Some 266 Centros de Maestros for training through workshops and national courses came into existence. In 1997 these activ- ities were combined with appraisal processes. In 2003 PRONAP became an instrument for assigning resources to the states for a new policy of in- service training. In 2005 the Dirección General de Formación Continua

de Maestros en Servicio (DGFCMS) was created within the federal min- istry with the task of providing technical support to the states, as well as establishing in- service training centres under its guidance and evaluat- ing the work undertaken in these centres.

An enormous pot-pourri of courses, seminars and workshops was created in a disorganized and uncoordinated manner. Most states took advantage of the financial support offered by the federal government to devise courses some of which only ever existed on paper. One of the prob- lems was that many of the state ministries had never had proper research and development sections and even where they existed they were popu- lated by trade- union-sponsored teachers ‘en comisión’, as federal officials soon found out. Many states lacked trained personnel and because there was rarely anything like a working relationship and/ or a mechanism for collaboration, they either ran few courses or had to request help from the ministry. The ministry was in no position to respond to their requests. The federal ministry itself had little or no knowledge of who ran which courses and where they took place, if indeed they took place at all. The federal ministry contributed to the confusion because, as we have seen, many of its own divisions had set up their own courses run by experts in collaboration with carefully selected teams in the provinces, much to the chagrin of state and trade- union authorities. These often- excellent courses, workshops and seminars were in many cases in competition with those set up by the new DGFCMS. Teachers never knew if a course would be recognized or even take place. The teachers’ centres were ill- equipped to set up, run and evaluate courses. There was no clear and consistent division of labour within the institutions and even less between them.

The DGFCMS set itself the unrealistic task of bringing the smor- gasbord of what was on offer under its wings. They did not take into account the ongoing work of other sections of the ministry nor did they have sufficient knowledge of what was going on in individual states. Their aim was to organize the states so that they offered in- service training for all subjects, pedagogy, information technology, school management and so on through a modular system set up, managed and accredited centrally. The idea was to manage if not micromanage almost 600 programmes offered to over a million teachers and to pro- vide appropriate certification. These courses were to be run through the 574 Centros de Maestros established throughout the country (see also Secretaría de Educación Pública, 2014). These institutions, too, varied enormously in quality and reach, with some being little more than paper institutions. Just under half were located in 9 of the 32 states and these states tended to monopolize the offer. Needless to say,

the poorest states with the least developed educational infrastructure were those that participated the least in the in- service programme. The ministry itself recognized that some of the teacher centres were populated with advisors and assessors from different national pro- grammes that often overlapped whilst others suffered from a shortage of personnel.

Nevertheless, the ministry personnel, largely drawn from universi- ties like the UPN, were determined to deal with the general problem and also with what they saw as one of the great obstacles to the effectiveness of the system, the lack of training in the increasingly important areas of administration, organization and leadership. Their first step was to col- lect information about the field and to see if they could use an already existing structure to begin to work towards a more coherent system of organization. However, many states had never conducted a proper audit, others refused to provide information or provided information that was difficult to interpret and teacher organizations responsible for large numbers of teachers and administrators ‘en comisión’ blocked attempts to gather basic information.