President Pena Nieto’s education reform sets Mexico on road to become a top world economy

Mexico’s new president, Enrique Pena Nieto, has plans to revitalise both his country’s skills and industry base. He has started with an education reform designed to enhance teacher quality, break down the political strangle-hold of the country’s 1.5 million-member teaching union and return control to the federal government. This is Mr Pena Nieto’s first step in a raft of programmes to drive the country towards its goal of being one the world’s top ten economies. But the test will be whether Mr Pena Nieto can persuade a country already suffering from reform fatigue to stand up to the union to implement badly needed changes in how teachers are recruited, trained, evaluated, and promoted or fired.