The Community Program

The Community Program started in 2005 with a mission to generate opportunities for sustainable social development through the implementation and evaluation of educational strategies. The Community Program began in a northern state of Mexico with the purpose of working parallel to SEP on a newly implemented initiative to relaunch civic education classes in public schools. The director and founder of the Community Program said that he initially came up with the idea for the program when he worked at a multinational corporation. During his time there, he increasingly received requests from other company employees about different paperwork they had received from their employer or from the bank. He claimed that “workers felt comfortable talking to him and asking him ‘their dumb’

questions, as the workers often referred to their concerns, and that they would not approach the people in the office because they were embarrassed.” He said that their questions were a result of “not knowing how to read and/or ask properly structured questions to the administrative personnel.” Several years later, after having left his job with the multinational corporation and having completed a graduate program for Comparative and International Education at Harvard School of Education, the director of the Community Program decided to go back to Mexico and open a not-for-profit organization with the purpose of working alongside SEP.

The Community Program began operations with only two people and with the intention of working with schools located in the marginalized communities the director had identified while still working for the multinational corporation. As the program began to map the schools that were of interest for them and to SEP, they realized there were more schools that

35 they could ever cover with only two people. Several months later the Community Program employed a group of people and identified possible business partners to fund their work.

The Community Program headquarters is currently located in a northern state of Mexico. In the past 12 years, the Community Program has established offices in five different states of the country, bringing their services to more communities in need. The office that I worked with is located in Mexico City, which is also the newest office. In Mexico City, at the time of fieldwork, the office employed approximately 20 people working in 20 schools. Most of the schools are located in rural communities in the outskirts of Mexico City. Commuting from the Program’s main office to the municipality where the member schools were located and back took an average of three hours. Since most of the Community Program leaders live in the center of the city, commuting to and from the schools is considered part of the working agreement. Some of the leaders told me that on several occasions, they have had to cancel planned trips to schools due to bad weather or protests that severely affect transportation through the city.

The Community Program meets the definition of an educational PPP for several reasons.

First of all, the Community Program works parallel to the SEP but is not part of it, meaning it is led and operated completely independent of the public education system. Secondly, it is funded by the use of public and private funds for the public good. Third, the program takes on limited risk for the services it provides. The Community Program finances its work and hires and trains it human capital with a mix of private and public funds. Lastly, the Community Program’s focus is to bring their resources to the schools in poor communities to generate opportunities for sustainable social development through the implementation and evaluation of educational strategies. According to the definition provided by Osborne and Gaebler (1992) cited by UNESCO, the Community Program can be considered a PPP as its work emphasizes equity, quality, social cohesion, composed with innovative techniques, and vitality through the “efficiency of the private sector, and the compassion and social commitment of the not-for-profit sector.”

At the time of the study the community program had thirty-six public elementary schools that were implementing their education strategies in Mexico City. I was able to visit three of the schools. They call their approach successful education strategies, which are designed to overcome the educational inequalities experienced in the school based on the dialogical and

communicative approach. Examples of successful education strategies include creating learning environments wherein a diverse group of students of different ability levels were brought together and implementing opportunities for students to receive extra help outside of the classroom. It is important to mention that 2016 marked the beginning of the Community Program’s work in Mexico City schools—now the fifth state the program operates in.

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4 Analytical Framework

The subject of quality education is an important issue for every country, given that it is a key determinant of economic and social potential in years to come. As I’ve stated, this study explores how key stakeholders perceive the effectiveness of the educational PPPs they have implemented in Mexico City primary schools in an effort to raise the quality of education in the region. In this study, I analyze the findings of my qualitative research using a theoretical framework based on the work of Paulo Freire. I use Freire’s critical consciousness model of education, which is composed of the concepts of consciousness, praxis, and dialogue (among others), to analyze stakeholder perceptions at the local level and assess the extent to which the programs are creating new capacities for students.

In his landmark book The Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968), Freire presents his philosophy of education for historically oppressed people. His core argument is that education (specifically literacy) is the key to liberating the potential of the oppressed, particularly those in third-world nations, as it gives them the tools to understand and remake their own reality.

However, education as it has been traditionally practiced is not sufficient. He conceives of this method as “the banking model of education,” wherein the instructor is an agent and the student is a mere passive recipient:

“Instead of communicating, the teacher issues communiques and makes deposits which the students patiently receive, memorize, and repeat...the teacher presents himself to his students as their necessary opposite; by considering their ignorance absolute, he justifies his own existence.” (1968: 58)

The problematic consequence of this approach is that students are not empowered to recognize and realize their own capacity for thinking critically about the world around them.

As Freire puts it, “The more completely they accept the passive role imposed on them, the more they tend simply to adapt to the world as it is and to the fragmented view of reality deposited in them.” (1968: 60)

The alternative to this approach is “problem-posing education.” Shor (1992) conceptualizes it well:

Problem-posing offers all subject matter as historical products to be questioned rather than as central bank wisdom to be accepted...The responsibility of the problem-posing teacher is to diversify subject matter and to use students’ thought and speech as the base for developing critical understanding of personal experience, unequal

conditions in society, and existing knowledge. In this democratic pedagogy, the teacher is not filling empty minds with official or unofficial knowledge but is posing knowledge in any form as a problem for mutual inquiry (32-33).

This approach cultivates critical thinking, or as Freire puts it, critical consciousness, in students by allowing them to participate in a reciprocal, constructive dialogue with their teachers. This dialogue precedes praxis, or reflection and action upon the environment and circumstances.

The following sections explore these three italicized concepts in more detail, and suggest how I plan to use each one in the analysis of my own primary research findings.