It is perhaps the hardest reform of all. Pension systems or energy shortages can be fixed by cutting entitlements or spending more. But no amount of money can in itself make a million qualified teachers materialise in less than a generation. That is the aim of the “Alliance for Educational Quality” launched by Felipe Calderón, Mexico’s president.

For decades Mexico has ignored it’s lax teaching reform. Poorly educated educators have only managed to produce poorly educated students; apathetic and ignorant to their rights and important place in a developing country such as ours.

In Mexico, we have hundreds of thousands of teachers protesting nationally to conserve the rights of plazas, or contracts, which were not earned, but bought. In a country where education and employment wages are beyond inadequate, the National Education Workers Union, headed by Elba Esther Gordillo, gave pensions, benefits, insurance, and attractive vacation packages a reason for these contracts to be in demand by many.

Many contracts have been bought by money, sex, political loyalty, and more. It is for that very reason, the ACE program launched by President Calderon with the approval of Gordillo has so many “teachers” enraged and protesting.

Mexico was placed dead last among members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, a club of mainly developed countries, in reading, science and mathematics in December by the Programme for International Student Assessment. Look beyond simple place rankings where Mexico ranked 29 out of 30, and the picture gets worse. On the reading part of the test, less than 1% of Mexican 15-year olds scored as “capable of sophisticated, critical thinking” (compared with 22% in South Korea, the top scorer). Over half of Mexican 15-year olds were classed as incapable of doing basic arithmetic on the maths portion of the test.

The new agreement between President Calderón and Ms Gordillo has two aims. First, there is a promise to improve the fabric of the 30,000 schools—around one in eight—that are in poor repair. Second, it seeks to break the hold of the union over teachers’ careers. Under the ACE agreement, teachers would be hired and promoted according to how they fare in a set of tests devised and marked by a new independent body.

‘’We are proposing to re-train about 150,000 teachers a year,'’ he said. ‘Adding together the newly hired and the re-trained teachers, we hope to renew the country’s teachers’ workforce within the next seven years.'’

The teachers are in protest not because of losing their employment, but because they are losing their right to pay without working. They are losing their right to further cripple a country which is already on it’s last leg; they are losing their right to enforce ignorance and destroy generations of once eager students.

Calderon is stripping them of their rights to condemn our nation.