13 November, 15:00-16:00 GMT
Speaker: Sylvia Schmelkes, Director of the Mexican National Institute of Educational Evaluation
This session will be held ONLINE ONLY.
Join us for a conversation with Sylvia Schmelkes, whose talk will explore the politics of educational inequality in Latin America and recount the story of Mexico’s short-lived educational evaluation institute, examining its impact, resistance from teachers, and eventual dissolution.
First, Sylvia will present her research project on equity in learning, and will address the fact that educational policy in Latin America is not designed with equity in mind. This is why there are enormous differences, correlated with socioeconomic status, geography, ethnicity and other factors, in access, permanence and learning. Her team’s research project is mapping what they know about the causes of inequality in learning, some of which have to do with the way policy is designed and implemented.
The second issue is the story of a short-lived autonomous institute dedicated to educational evaluation in Mexico. This Institute had as its objectives the evaluation of the educational system (teachers, students, schools and policy), the coordination of the National System of Educational Evaluation, and the formulation of evidence-based policy recommendations. The institute played an important role in developing the norms for teacher evaluation (for entry, promotion and performance), which met with the resistance of teachers and their union. This resistance ultimately led to the dissolution of the Institute during the first semester of the previous administration, with the reform of Article 3 of the Constitution, thus fulfilling a campaign promise of the newly elected President Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Sylvia will share her analysis of the reasons that explain the creation, development and demise of this Institute.
Sylvia Schmelkes is a Sociologist, Master in Educational Research and Development, both in Universidad Iberoamericana Mexico City. Educational researcher since 1970. She has published more than 400 articles, chapters and books on the quality of education, adult education, values education and intercultural education. She founded and was General Coordinator for Intercultural and Bilingual Education in the Education Ministry in Mexico. She chaired the governing board the Centre for Educational Research and Innovation of the OECD. She received the Joan Amos Comenius Medal from the Czech Republic and UNESCO for her contributions to education in 2008. She was head of the Research Institute for the Development of Education in Universidad Iberoamericana. She chaired the governing board of the now extinct National Institute for the Evaluation of Education. She is an honorary fellow of UIL and has received three honorary PhDs. She served as Academic Vice President of Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City. She served as co-chair of the International Expert Group on SDGs in Higher Education convened by UNESCO to write the report Knowledge Driven Actions: Transforming Higher Education for Global Sustainability. At present she is an Honorary Researcher in Universidad Iberoamericana and coordinator of the Chair on Educational Justice that carries her name.
Organisers: This seminar is organised by the Research for Equitable Access and Learning (REAL) Centre and the POLED network at the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge. The Politics of Education (POLED) network is a student-led special interest group designed to foster critical discourse about the politics of education amongst scholars, practitioners and policy experts. It was set up to explore the role of political economy in addressing the contemporary issues facing education in developing countries.