By David López García
Samantha Cocco-Klein’s leading précis offers an example of how the reform of the education system in the United States made its way into the 100 days agenda of President-elect Trump. Through her analysis of the School Choice and Education Opportunity Act, Samantha launches the question of how do frameworks and theories on policy implementation inform our understanding of the proposed agenda? By discussing the case of President Peña’s Education Reform Bill of 2013 in Mexico, I will argue that if President-elect Trump’s education reform fails to take into account the policy goals of the street-level bureaucrats, or if it diverges considerably from existing policies, street-level bureaucrats can potentially use the implementation phase as a political arena to advance their own agenda.
When President Peña took office in 2013 he started his term with what Keeler (1993) calls an impressive mandate that opened for his administration a “macro-window providing sufficient opportunity for profound policy innovations across a variety of issue areas” (p. 229). Capitalizing this macro-window, the then President-elect Peña started a negotiation table with Congress members representing the three main political parties of Mexico –PRI, PAN and PRD– to work in what was know as the Pacto por México [Pact for Mexico][1]. The Pact for Mexico and its commitments were made public in a press conference that took place on the second day of President Peña’s term and entailed a list of common goals for Mexico’s structural change on several policy issues. The transformation of the education system was among the main commitments of the Pact for Mexico.
The negotiations in the Pact for Mexico allowed the agreement on an Education Reform Bill, which President Peña sent to the Congress during the 10th day of his administration. The Education Reform Bill aimed at increasing the quality of Mexico’s elementary education through a twofold strategy. First, through the creation of a Teachers Tenure-Track System (TTTS) comprise of proper evaluation for the hiring, permanence, and promotion of teachers in the system. Second, through the creation of a new agency called Instituto Nacional para la Evaluación de la Educación [National Institute for the Evaluation of Education], which would be the agency implementing the TTTS and the teacher evaluations. According to Canedo (2016), at that time most of the blame on Mexico’s poor education system was placed on the overwhelming control that teacher’s unions had over the hiring and promotion of teachers. At the heart of the Education Reform Bill was the desire of Mexican political leaders of giving back to the government, rather than the unions, the power to hire and fire teachers by testing them by their performance, which in turn was thought of as the solution to overcome the corruption and inefficiencies in the education system (Canedo, 2016).
As this account conveys, President Peña’s Education Reform Bill is an example of a classic “Top-Down” approach to policy implementation with an emphasis in policy design. In this approach to implementation, policy design involves the selection of the appropriate policy instruments given the context and the nature of the policy subsystem involved in implementation (Howlett, Ramesh & Perl, 2009; Koontz & Newig, 2014). This account also supports Lipsky’s claim that the relationship between political leaders and street-level bureaucrats is inherently conflictual (1980, p. 25). President Peña’s Education Reform Bill is an attempt to reduce street-level bureaucrats discretion (Lipsky, 1980) by setting a new institutional framework that eliminated the distortions in the principal-agent relationship between the federal government and the teachers (Howlett, et al, 2009).
The Education Reform Bill was enacted in September 2013. From that moment on, one of the two major teacher unions in Mexico, the National Coordinator of Education Workers (CENTE) has sustained a permanent strike and taken the streets in demonstrations against the reform[2]. The CENTE resists the reform on the grounds that the new evaluation system is only intended to fire teachers, not to improve the quality of education[3]. The resistance reached a major point of tension in June 2016, when a violent clash between police and unionized teachers in Nochixtlán, in the southern state of Oaxaca, left six dead teachers[4]. Since then, public opinion in Mexico turned against President Peña’s government and put into question the implementation strategy of the reform. In a recent interview after the Nochixtlán events, Mexico’s Education Minister, Aurelio Nuño, acknowledged that the Education Reform Bill will now be under revision and that President Peña’s government is willing to negotiate if the results of teacher’s evaluations will determine their permanence in the job or not[5].
The recent events support Howlett et al. claim that policy implementation is a stage of the policy process that is inherently political, a stage “shaped by political factors related to state capacity to deal with specific issues and the complexity of the subsystem with which it must deal” (2009, p. 175). In their view, some actors of the relevant policy subsystem can use the implementation stage “as simply another opportunity for continuing the conflicts they may have lost at earlier stages of the policy process” (Howlett, et al, 2009: 161). The CENTE’s strategy to resist the reform also confirms Lipsky’s (1980) claims that while managers are interested in achieving results consistent with the agency’s objectives, street-level bureaucrats will entail actions to maintain and expand their authority and circumvent any attempt at reform that limits their discretion.
Returning to President-elect Trump’s School Choice and Education Opportunity Act, some lessons can be learned from the Mexican experience. Ultimately, according to the latest trends in the policy implementation literature (Howlett, et al, 2009, p. 173), if a solution is going to be found for the education reform conundrum in Mexico, it must be one in which policy design is carefully related to the policy goals of the actors involved in the policy subsystem, and the new goals and tools are also close to existing policies. Thus, President-elect Trump should not make the same mistakes, and he should thoroughly assess the street-level bureaucrats’ policy goals and take them into account in the design and implementation of his own reform.
References
Canedo, A. (2016) Mexico’s education reform: What went wrong? Georgetown Public Policy Review, March 2016, Accessible at: http://gppreview.com/2016/03/10/mexicos-education-reform-what-went-wrong/
Howlett, R., Ramesh, M., & Perl, A. (2009) Studying public policy: Policy cycles and policy subsystems. Third Edition. Oxford University Press.
Keeler, J. (1993) Opening the window for reform: Mandates, crises, and extraordinary policy-making. Comparative Political Studies, 25(4), pp. 433-486.
Koontz, T. & Newig, J. (2014) From planning to implementation: Top-down and bottom-up approaches to collaborative watershed management. The Policy Studies Journal, 42(3), pp. 416-442.
Lipsky, M. (1980) Street-level bureaucracy: Dilemmas of the individual in public services. Russell Sage Foundation.
[1] http://pactopormexico.org/como/
[2] Univisión: “El Congreso Aprobó la Reforma Educativa en México” http://www.univision.com/noticias/noticias-de-mexico/el-congreso-aprobo-la-reforma-educativa-en-mexico
[3] Azam Ahmed & Kirk Semple: “Clashes Draw Support for Teacher’s Protest in Mexico” http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/27/world/americas/mexico-teachers-protests-enrique-pena-nieto.html?ref=nyt-es
[4] Associated Press: “Violence at Mexico teachers' protest leaves six dead, officials say” https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jun/20/violence-mexico-teachers-protest-dead-oaxaca-union
[5] Ernesto Villanueva: “La reforma educativa: en la mira” http://www.proceso.com.mx/447814/la-reforma-educativa-en-la-mira