Mexico Education

Phoebe Watson was a grammar school principal in this remote outpost on the Mexican border in 1950 when she helped strike a bargain with neighboring Palomas, Mexico. "If they had children who wanted to enroll in our school and we had the room, we'd take 'em," said Watson, 82, now mayor of this village of 750 people. What began as a quiet arrangement with a handful of students now has led to the busing of 465 Palomas youths a year to schools here and in Deming, 30 miles to the north.

Anaheim schools trustees appointed to their board Thursday a polarizing figure whom voters tossed off the school board in 2002 after, among other things, he proposed billing Mexico for educating illegal immigrants. Harald Martin, a retired police officer who served on the school board for eight years, was appointed by a 3-1 vote to an Anaheim Union High School District board spot created by the death of Trustee Denise Mansfield-Reinking.

Professor Socorro Marcos, a department head at Monterrey Technical Institute, was chatting recently with two postgraduate students. Julio Larios asked her to serve on his thesis committee, while Juan Carlos Cielo Flores had questions about a paper's final draft. During these discussions, Larios was in Honduras, Cielo Flores was at his office in Peru, and the professor never left her desk at the Monterrey Tech campus in this northern Mexican city.

Like soccer stars and Roman Catholic saints, intellectuals have long held a prized status within Mexican society. Octavio Paz, the Nobel Prize-winning poet and diplomat who died in 1998, is more revered than most former presidents. Illuminati such as writers Carlos Fuentes and Carlos Monsivais, historian Enrique Krauze and journalist-novelist Elena Poniatowska are constantly being quoted in the newspapers, feted with official honors and solicited for their views on a smorgasbord of subjects.

Thirty educational leaders from Mexico met with Anaheim school officials Thursday to learn more about American schools and develop contacts in an era of improving trade relations between the United States and Mexico. The chief executives of Mexico's Instituto Tecnologicos, which is equivalent to the state university systems in the United States, are touring Southern California's high schools and colleges.

Six educators from Hermosillo, Mexico, will visit Irvine Valley College this week to learn about American higher education and discuss international business and commerce issues between the two countries. A key issue during their visit will be the North American Free Trade Agreement. The educators are scheduled to attend a World Trade Center of Orange County conference titled "Doing Business With Mexico" and will hear Rep. Christopher Cox (R-Newport Beach) discuss the merits of NAFTA.

Coast College District Chancellor Alfred P. Fernandez has been selected to be one of two California community college representatives to the U.S./Mexico Border Conference on Education, co-hosted by the U.S. Department of Education and the Mexican Secretariat of Education. The conference will take place Oct. 6-8 in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, and El Paso. Fernandez, who was recommended by California Community College State Chancellor David Mertes, will represent the Coast District at the conference.

Students at Mexico's largest university voted Sunday to end an 18-day strike over proposed academic reforms, which included an increase in fees, but conditioned a return to classes on the administration promising not to punish strike leaders. Members of the University Student Council, an ad hoc body formed last fall to fight the reform package, voted 35-11 Sunday to end the strike.

An estimated 60,000 high school and university students marched to Mexico City's central Zocalo Plaza to protest proposed changes at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. Increased police strength was apparent as the students streamed into the plaza for about two hours, but no violence was reported. The students object to proposals for increased entrance exam requirements, stiffer attendance requirements and higher fees.

When students first went on strike last April to protest new fees at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, there was an air of righteous struggle for free education at public universities in this poor country. More than nine months later, as strikers at the barricades fight bloody skirmishes with students who want to go back to classes, that original lofty purpose is a fading memory.

Three weeks ago, veteran New Mexico educator Jesse L. Gonzales turned down the chance to be Compton's new schools superintendent, citing declining physical strength. On Monday, after a change of heart, Gonzales agreed to take over one of the most stressful education jobs in California. Gonzales, 63, will be the first locally appointed superintendent in Compton in eight years.

The border, for Velia Gandarilla, is a point on a sidewalk she strides across every school day as the sun starts to rise over the desert. "I don't see the difference going from one country to the other. Just going to school," says the 17-year-old who wakes up at home in Palomas, Mexico, but attends classes--and will graduate this month, a first in her family--in the United States. At 6:55 a.m., her styled hair still wet, her violin case in hand, Velia enters the U.S.

Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo pondered long and hard on how to recover the National Autonomous University campus from student strikers outraged by a plan to increase tuition from two cents a year to $100 for those who could afford it. Zedillo had reason for pause. As a student in Mexico City in 1968 he felt the weight of the intolerant government of President Gustavo Diaz Ordaz, who, unable to deal with a student protest, sent in his soldiers.

When students first went on strike last April to protest new fees at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, there was an air of righteous struggle for free education at public universities in this poor country. More than nine months later, as strikers at the barricades fight bloody skirmishes with students who want to go back to classes, that original lofty purpose is a fading memory.

Professor Socorro Marcos, a department head at Monterrey Technical Institute, was chatting recently with two postgraduate students. Julio Larios asked her to serve on his thesis committee, while Juan Carlos Cielo Flores had questions about a paper's final draft. During these discussions, Larios was in Honduras, Cielo Flores was at his office in Peru, and the professor never left her desk at the Monterrey Tech campus in this northern Mexican city.

Half the year, Ernesto Robledo puts on blue jeans and a T-shirt and walks about a mile to school, just like any other fifth-grader at Park Avenue School in Yuba City, Calif. The other six months, he dresses in the crimson sweater, white shirt and checked pants uniform of the Altamirano Grade School, six dirt blocks from his home here in central Mexico.

Coast Community College District Chancellor Alfred P. Fernandez signed a "binational" agreement with Mexican education officials on Thursday to foster an exchange of educational and economic information between colleges in the two countries. The agreement was signed during a formal, one-hour ceremony attended by several of the college district's trustees as well as staff members representing some local members of the state Legislature.

Striking students shut down Latin America's largest university Thursday in a conflict that centers on admission standards and fees but also brings into focus discontent over government economic and social policies. The strike began at midnight on the sprawling campus of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, which lies on the southern outskirts of Mexico City.

Six educators from Hermosillo, Mexico, will visit Irvine Valley College this week to learn about American higher education and discuss international business and commerce issues between the two countries. A key issue during their visit will be the North American Free Trade Agreement. The educators are scheduled to attend a World Trade Center of Orange County conference titled "Doing Business With Mexico" and will hear Rep. Christopher Cox (R-Newport Beach) discuss the merits of NAFTA.

Enrique Geffroy earned a Ph.D. in chemical engineering at Caltech and landed a prestigious teaching job in the United States. Yet when the Mexican government launched a drive to bring scientists back home 1 1/2 years ago, he was among the first to respond, even though it meant taking a position at half the pay. "I decided that, given my experience, I could contribute something to the development of physics in Mexico," Geffroy said.