Recently an American Federation of Teachers resolution declared that U.S. public schools are held hostage to a "testing fixation rooted in the No Child Left Behind Act," and condemned its "extreme misuse as a result of ideologically and politically driven education policy." AFT President Randi Weingarten proposed instead "public education should be obsessed with high-quality teaching and learning, not high-stakes testing." In Seattle teachers at Garfield High have refused to give them.

Many Mexican teachers would find these sentiments familiar. The testing regime in Mexico is as entrenched as it is in the United States, and its political use is very similar - undermining the rights of teachers, and attacking unions that oppose it. In Michoacán, in central Mexico, sixteen teachers went to jail because they also refused to administer standardized tests. But the teachers' union in the southern state of Oaxaca, Section 22 of the National Union of Education Workers (SNTE), has not only refused to implement standardized tests - it has proposed its own reform of the education system, one designed by teachers themselves.

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Over the last two decades, however, corporate influence has grown over Mexico's educational system. "They started creating mechanisms for controlling the ideology of both teachers and students," Lavarriega says, "trying to certify education in the same way they'd certify a product - to sell it."

Perez Rocha sees parallels with the U.S. "The Mexican right always copies the United State's right," he laughs. "The politics of merit pay and the correlation with standardized exam results is identical between the two countries. The right wants to convert education into a commodity and students into merchandise-'Let's fill their heads with information and put them to work.'" Nevertheless, he notes, there are important differences, because the national union in Mexico is an entrenched part of the power structure.

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