First Intercambio Magazine – June 2008

Intercambio – Volume 1, Number 1

Contents

• The standardized testing agenda – Rosemary Lee
• The case of human rights violations in the “Examen Unico” – Sección Mexicana de la Coalición Trinacional
  en Defensa de la Educación Pública
• The College of Teachers as a Source of Division among Teachers – Larry Kuehn
• A frustrated attempt to divide the peruvian teaching profession – SUTEP
• The experience of FREP in formulation and application of A Non-Sexist And Inclusive Educational Proposal – Luzmila Sánchez Cosio and Zoraida I. Aizpurúa
• Impact of FTAs on public education and the peoples of Central America – Interviews by María Trejos
• The teaching profession debates and presents proposals for the strengthening of public education – María Trejos Montero
• The reform of social security in México – José Antonio Vital Galicia

Presentation

After a long silence –obligated by the increasing conflicts generated in our countries by the advance of commercializing education policies– we are hereby formally inaugurating publication of the magazine “Intercambio”, with the firm commitment to publish it three times per year.
In this edition, we have achieved the collaboration of colleagues from the northern and southern reaches of the Americas, addressing five topics of crucial importance:

1. Impacts of the Central American Free Trade Agreements on the right to quality public education, and the resistance of the education workers and peoples of the region.
2. Two emblematic cases of standardized evaluation experiences, one in the United States at the kindergarten level and another in Mexico at the high school level.
3. The attempt in Mexico to privatize the rights of two million public employees –the majority of them education and health workers – to social security and health services, and the struggles against it.
4. Two experiences of attacks against union organizations, one in British Colombia, Canada and the other in Peru, with a similar governmental strategy: the creation of “Colleges of Professors,” and the coincidentally similar tactics used in the responses of the union organizations –located in opposite geographic poles of the continent– to revert the blow. And finally, we include the first of a series of articles.
5. To disseminate experiences of promotion, training and formation of education workers in construction of non-sexist, inclusive, and liberating education proposals, in this case relating a very systematic experience from the Federation of Teaching Organizations of Central America, Peru and Ecuador, a participating organization of the SEPA network.

This edition of “Intercambio” also includes a five-minute video elaborated especially for us, relating the experience of one of the most important struggles of this period: the opposition of Central American education workers to the privatization of education brought about in the aftermath of signature of the Free Trade Agreements.
We still have much to improve in “Intercambio” in order to achieve the objectives we posed for this publication in the researchers’ network. Our hope is that each of the articles may convert not only into the dissemination of processes and struggles or elaboration of alternatives, but also into instruments for action in our communities. We also hope that, step by step, this space may serve as incentive to many men and women, integrants of the SEPA network, to write about their lines of research and to open spaces for the formation of working groups by research theme.
We invite the contributions of all of our readers in defense of public education in the region.
Editorial Committee
June 2008