In a pointed opinion piece, columnist Maite Azuela takes aim at Mexico’s Secretariat of Public Education (SEP), the federal agency that oversees the country’s schools. Her argument: while officials obsess over how Mexican students perform on the PISA exam—the international standardized test that compares academic achievement across countries—they’re failing to confront a much darker problem happening inside classrooms.
Azuela contends that sexual abuse of children in educational settings deserves at least as much urgency and public attention as test scores, if not more. Her piece suggests that by fixating on rankings and academic metrics, education authorities risk overlooking, minimizing, or simply failing to act on cases of abuse that put children’s safety and wellbeing directly at risk.
The column reflects a broader critique often leveled at government agencies worldwide: that measurable, reputation-driven goals like international rankings can crowd out messier, harder-to-quantify problems that require sustained institutional will to address—like protecting vulnerable children from predators who may be embedded within the very system meant to educate and protect them.
Azuela’s piece is a call to action for education officials to broaden their definition of success beyond test scores, and to treat child protection as a core responsibility of the school system, not an afterthought.
To read Maite Azuela’s full column, visit El Universal.
Source: SEP, no sólo es PISA, también el abuso sexual de infancias (eluniversal.com.mx). English version produced with AI assistance.
Image: Max Klingensmith, BY-ND 2.0 (via Openverse).