hang up the phone, Calderon

People, I never realized all the dimensions in which Felipe Calderon has been a bad president for Mexico.

This recent article in the Washington Post reveals another; He sold his soul to Elba Esther Gordillo, condemning Mexican public schools to another sexenio of misery.

The article details the misery,

 "The country is a member of the Group of 20 and boasts of the world’s 14th-largest economy, but only a quarter of its children graduate from high school. Sixth-graders in Mexico get 562 hours of “instructional learning” a year. In South Korea, it’s 1,195 hours...


 Yet Mexico’s lame performance is not about money. A generous 20 percent of the country’s budget goes to education, about $30 billion a year. More than 90 percent goes to salaries — negotiated by the teachers union, which dictates policy.


 “It was — and sadly still is — a very corrupt system,” said Carlos Ornelos, a specialist in education at the Autonomous Metropolitan University who was one of the first, in the 1990s, to expose the practice of teachers buying and selling their jobs. An elementary school teaching post, a tenured position for life, still sells for as much as $20,000 in the resort city of Cancun, and a post in a rural village can be had for $2,000, Ornelas said."

Yikes!






Calderon campaigned for education reform, but in the run up to the close 2006 election he sold his soul to the devil, aka  Elba Esther Gordillo,

"Calderon owed at least a slice of his razor-thin victory in 2006 to the head of the teachers union. A lifelong militant and former general secretary in the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, Gordillo switched sides in the election to back Calderon and to sway her members to follow. The PRI kicked her out. After his election, Calderon appointed Gordillo’s allies to various top posts in the government, including her son-in-law Fernando Gonzalez as deputy secretary of education. Calderon cut a deal with Gordillo that the union, not the government, should lead on reforms, to avoid mass protests and shuttered schools, according to insiders at the education ministry."

Double Yikes!!

And some people think we have a problem with teachers' unions in the USA.

By the way, El Peje (AMLO) has said getting rid of Gordillo would be a priority in his administration.