The Program for the Improvement of Academic Achievement in México: Tutorial Relationships as an Imposition of Freedom to Transform the Instructional Core

ABSTRACT

This article explores the importance of school-level actors in creating educational change. I present an “inside-out” and “counter-hegemonic” policy that built Tutoría networks of learning to transform power relationships at school. I explore (1) the origins of Tutoría and how it grew into a mandated national policy to improve teaching and learning, (2) the policy’s theory of action and learning assumptions to transform the instructional core, and (3) its effectiveness and how this was done at scale through the transformation of student and teacher identity through a policy design that was built from and became a social movement.

Acknowledgments

I thank Dr. Gabriel Cámara and Maestra Dalila López for their continued support in writing and refining this manuscript. Their insight and encouragement have made this article and the continued movement in creating a different kind of education possible in México and many other parts of the world.

Notes

¹. The group changed its name is 2012 and is now called Redes de Tutoría, S.C.

². The number of schools that were considered “failing” was about, 29,147. This is 13% of all 214,000 Mexican public schools. EIMLE’s first phrase of action was with a select 9,000 schools, within the larger 29,147 labelled “failing” (Dirección General de Desarrollo de la Gestión e Innovación Educativa, 2012; SNIE, 2015).