OLPC Mexico

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2007 status: red
	red
Estado actual: rojo

UPDATE: We are trying to concentrate efforts geared towards the deployment of the OLPC in Spanish speaking countries in the Americas in a single page: OLPC Spanish America.

ATENCIÓN: Estamos tratando de concentrar los esfuerzos destinados al desarrollo de la OLPC en los países de habla Castellana en las Américas en una página central: OLPC Spanish America.

Education in Mexico

Educational oversight Minister of Public Education	[Secretaria of Public Education] [Josefina Vázquez Mota]
[Funding|National education budget]	[Mexican peso|MXN]$501.214 billion ([2004])
[Language|Primary language(s) of education]	[Spanish language|Spanish]. Available also in [Nahuatl language|Náhuatl] and other minority languages.
Nationalized system Establishment	[September 25], [1921]
[Literacy] (2000)  • Men  • Women	90.5 % 92.5 % 88.6 %
Enrollment  • [Primary education|Primary]  • [Secondary education|Secondary]  • [Post-secondary education|Post-secondary]	26.6 million 18.5 million 5.8 million 2.3 million
Attainment  • [Secondary education|Secondary diploma]  • [Post-secondary education|Post-secondary diploma]	N/A N/A
Sources: Sistema Educativo de los Estados Unidos Mexicanos. Principales cifras, ciclo escolar 2003-2004 [pdf] and the 2000 Census ([National Institute of Statistics, Geography, and Data Processing|INEGI])

introduction

Levels of educational attainment have increased rapidly in most developing countries since the 1950s (Schultz, 1988).

Although Mexico also benefited from that development, there was a significant lag in its educational indicators. Londoño (1996), for example, points to an “education deficit,” according to which Latin American countries in general, and Mexico in particular, have approximately two years less education than would be expected for their level of development.

Elías (1992) finds that education was the most important source of improvement in the quality of labor in Latin America between 1950 and 1970, although such improvements did not take place to the same extent in Mexico as in other countries in the region.

This changed dramatically in the 1980s. Mexico’s educational attainment increased steadily after the 1970s, it remained below the international trend line.

The closure of Mexico’s education gap vis-à-vis the rest of the world was hastened in part by the country’s economic stagnation. Mexico’s real GDP per capita in the mid-1990s was roughly the same as it had been in the first half of the 1980s.

Nevertheless, this should not detract from the remarkable increase in schooling that occurred during the 1980s. While the level of average schooling in Mexico increased by roughly a year per decade during 1960–80 (from 2.76 to 4.77 years), it increased by two years in the decade of the 1980s.

This acceleration in schooling was the product of concerted efforts to increase the coverage of basic education, combined with advances made in the reduction of primary school repetition and dropout rates.

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MÉXICO: An important bond between the equipment of OLPC Colombia and the interested ones in Mexico has been created.

MÉXICO: Se ha establecido un vínculo importante entre el equipo de OLPC Colombia y los interesados de echar a andar este proyecto en México.

News

OLPC Spanish America/Latest News

Challenges

Even though the levels of educational attainment expanded very rapidly, Mexico experienced a pronounced increase in the degree of inequality over the 1980s and mid- 1990s. Most of the deterioration in the distribution of income happened in the middle to late 1980s (1984–89). The early 1990s displayed little change in total current income inequality except for a slight trend toward deterioration.

The trends in the distribution of earnings differ from the trends in the distribution of current income in two ways. First, the gains are not limited to the richest 10 percent, as those in the seven-, eight-, and nine- tenths of the distribution improved their relative earnings over the period by almost 2 percentage points. Second, the distribution of earnings clearly worsened in the 1990s until 1996, although the inequality associated with total current income was moderately stable in the 1990s, displaying an improvement after 1996. Differences in the behavior of total current income and labor earnings inequalities from 1994 to 1996 support the idea that the poor, who rely the most on labor as a source of income, are the least able to protect themselves during a recession.

Education is a key variable for our understanding of income and earnings inequality in Mexico. Education is by far the variable that accounts for the largest share of earnings inequality in Mexico, in terms of both its gross and its marginal contribution. The marginal contribution of education to the explanation of inequality in Mexico is almost equal to the joint contribution of other relevant variables such as age, economic sector, labor market status and hours worked.

It is worth pointing out that the difference between the gross and marginal contributions has been increasing over time, indicating that, as the economy progresses, education becomes even more important in determining the choices of sectors and occupations. That is, the workers’ skills are becoming increasingly relevant in determining their type of participation in the labor market as well as their position across different economic segments of the economy. The contribution of education to income inequality in Mexico is the second highest in Latin America, next only to Brazil. Moreover, what seems to be particularly interesting in the Mexican experience is that the significance of education has been increasing over time.

The contribution of relevant variables to changes in inequality for different intervals of time shows the following facts.

• First, education has the highest gross contribution in explaining changes in earnings distribution.
• Second, both changes in the distribution of education and in the relative earnings among educational groups have always been in phase with the alterations in the earnings distribution. Specifically, when the income profile effect related to education became steeper and the inequality of education increased, the earnings distribution worsened (as in the 1988-1996 period).
• Third, changes in the relative earnings among educational groups are always the leading force behind changes in inequality.

Other Proyects

• Ukini Open Knowledge Initiative to leverage the digital divide in Mexican Education System

Telesecundarias

Telesecundaria is a Televsion based system of distance education programs for secondary and high school students created by the government of Mexico in 1968 and available in rural areas of the country as well as Central America, South America, Canada and the United States via satellite (Solidaridad 1 and Satmex 5).

The project broadcasts more than 4,000 programs on a dedicated tv network available from satellite dish and a television. Currently more than 16,000 rural locations serve nearly one million students.

Documentation

• Emulacion con Qemu
• Education in Mexico
• Enciclomedia News Centre A blog dedicated to compile news on the Mexico's Enciclomedia

References

Gladys López-Acevedo (LCSPE)