Teacher Education and Development Study in Mathematics - IEA

120
TEACHER PAY AND STUDENT MATHEMATICS ACHIEVEMENT
Teacher education
Primary school teachers in Mexico traditionally trained in normal schools, but since
the mid 1980s, all primary and secondary teachers have been required to obtain
university-level degrees, from either university or post-secondary normal schools.
Although secondary school teachers generally have university degrees, a 2004 Mexican
employment survey (National Institute of Statistics, Geography, and Information,
2004) found that a significant proportion of secondary teachers had not completed a
university qualification.
In 2004, Mexico had 457 teachers’ colleges nationwide, with an enrollment of 169,671
students. Public institutions enrolled 60% of the students attending teachers’ colleges in
2004; the remaining 40% of students attended private teachers’ colleges. In 2004, 28%
of students attending teachers’ colleges were enrolled in programs offering a primary
teaching degree, compared with 39% in secondary teaching programs and 19% in
preschool programs (Guevara & González, 2004).
In 1993, Mexico’s Ministry of Education established the Carerra Magisterial (CM), a new
promotion (and pay) system for teachers. The system allows teachers who voluntarily
enter the CM to raise their salaries by a point system based on examinations, in-service
training, and the performance of their students. By attaining CM points, teachers can
double their salary while maintaining the same level of experience and pre-service
education. This voluntary horizontal promotion arrangement is supposed to reward
teachers who attempt to improve their skills as teachers and thereby improve student
performance. Evidence suggests that teachers’ scores on the academic knowledge section
of the CM teacher test correlate significantly and positively with student performance,
especially at the secondary school level (Luschei, 2005; Santibañez, 2002). Nevertheless,
the CM is primarily a mechanism for substantially raising teacher pay by legitimizing
that increase as part of a teacher-improvement incentive program.
Another development in the early 1990s (1992/1993) saw the central government
devolving control of the federal portion of educational spending and school
administration to the states. Today, the federal government provides block grants for
education to the states, and the states then allocate resources as they see fit to the schools.
Hiring of teachers also became the province of the states, although the teacher union
continues to be organized at national level, and general salary policies continue to be
negotiated nationally. The federal government (via the Ministry of Education) is still
responsible for national plans, developing curricula and textbooks, developing materials
for teacher education, and evaluating the national system (including individual state
systems). 15 The federal government also supplies textbooks free to primary students.
15 The federal government established an autonomous evaluation institution, the Institute for the Evaluation of
Education, in 2001. However, some states have set up (or are setting up) local centers that have taken on the task
of developing programs designed to evaluate school performance.