The New Mexican School (NEM) at a Disadvantage: Lack of Diagnostic Tests Hinders Evaluation of Educational Model

With its study plans and programs, as well as the new free textbooks, the New Mexican School (NEM) promoted by this government goes blind due to the lack of diagnostic tests in the classroom to know the successes or errors of the educational model for basic level, applied at the beginning of the six-year term, say specialists in didactic issues.

“The NEM is going absolutely blind. We have practically no evaluations since the National Institute for the Evaluation of Education (INEE) disappeared,” says Eduardo Backoff Escudero, former president of the Governing Board of the defunct INEE and president of the Board of Directors of Educational Metrics.

He explains that the last evaluation that was carried out in this six-year term was in 2019 and was the Explanatory Comparative Regional Study (ERCE), organized by UNESCO, and the PISA test (Program for International Student Assessment, in English), regulated by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which was applied in 2022 and whose results will be announced in December of this year.

Without evaluations, says Backoff Escudero, the outlook for basic education students is not rosy, because education is adrift.

“We are blind, we do not know in which part of the navigation path we are going. This can truly cause a collapse and cause each state to go its own way, which will further accentuate inequalities and the educational gap ”, she explains.

Alma Maldonado, a researcher at the Department of Educational Research of the Center for Research and Advanced Studies (Cinvestav), of the National Polytechnic Institute, maintains that the application of diagnostic evaluations is not contemplated in this new educational strategy, so it will be difficult to know their results in the classroom.

“That is not contemplated in the model. Because for that it was also the piloting that the Ministry of Public Education wanted to do and which in the end it did not carry out, now the piloting is going to be for all basic education students and this is going to be a year of piloting. But without a clear scheme of anything, evaluation and follow-up ”, he refers.

The specialist agrees with Backoff Escudero, when mentioning that the NEM is going down a dark and winding road, pointing out “how it will be known if the girls, boys and adolescents learned better, if it worked and what to improve all this is not clear. There is neither an evaluation nor an implementation design”.

Maldonado external that by not having a national panorama on the state of student learning, erroneous educational policies will continue to be implemented and “we will continue in the dark, without clarity because there will be no comparative references. Blindly we went through the pandemic and blindly we are going to go through a new educational model”.

Marco Fernández, coordinator of Anticorruption and Education of the civil organization México Evalúa and researcher at the School of Government of the Tecnológico de Monterrey, considers that under the rhetoric of the current government that the evaluations do not contemplate the context of the students or that they are impositions of international organizations, now any measurement instrument has been discarded to know the state of student learning.

“This would allow us to reliably have an x-ray of what children learn in different grades in the country’s public and private schools, and this is very worrying, because without diagnostic evaluations it will not be possible to implement pedagogical strategies aimed at correcting the failures in learning”, he refers.

It also states that “we are only going to have an international evaluation such as PISA and very circumscribed to young people in secondary and high school, and from then on, the country is navigating blindly except for the states that make efforts to develop their own evaluations, such as Nuevo León, Guanajuato, Yucatán, Querétaro and Jalisco”.

For the specialist, it is “easier to hide in ignorance and opacity and dress it up with simplistic rhetoric. All this rhetoric hides the only thing that we are not going to have information to know what positive results there are, what needs to be substantially improved in the design of analytical plans, in the part of pedagogical strategies and if textbooks are instruments effective for the expected learning that is determined in the synthetic plans. We’re not going to have any of that.”

He points out that this rejection of diagnostic evaluations “full-length portrays a government that despises education, that despises basing its decisions on evidence and, to hide its indolence, uses cheap rhetoric.”

Member of the Governing Board of the late INEE, Bernardo Naranjo points out that “nothing can be evaluated if there is no explanation about where we are going in education, but this is one of the characteristics of this administration, which is not like the measurements.

He explains that what was being done in Mexico and is being practiced throughout the world, including China, Vietnam and Cuba, where political ideology has weight, “evaluations are carried out, there is talk of educational quality. If one goes to the page of the Ministry of Education of Cuba, one will find the word quality, evaluation and elements of a curriculum ordered by subjects and a number of things that in Mexico were eliminated”.

He says that the only parameter that the country will have in terms of learning will be the PISA test, because all the evaluations that existed were discarded, such as ERCE, Planea and teacher qualification. “This is not an ideological issue, because countries of the right, center and left apply evaluations. Today Mexico is the exception, not because of an ideological issue, but because of a very great lack of knowledge, ”he says.