Mexico Wanted to Change the Way Teaching Happens
In recent years, educational reforms across much of the world have begun speaking a similar language. Critical thinking, project-based learning, collaboration, interdisciplinary work, connection with the community… The idea that schools should teach more than content alone has become a kind of mantra in many international education policies.
Mexico turned that discussion into the core of the New Mexican School (NEM), the educational reform launched by the state in 2019. Its proposal sought to move away from rote instruction and toward more active, inclusive models connected to students’ social and cultural contexts. The curriculum incorporated project-based learning, community-oriented approaches, interdisciplinary work, and interculturality as part of a broader attempt to transform everyday school experience.
The ambition was considerable. For decades, Mexico has struggled with deep educational inequalities between regions, persistent cultural and linguistic gaps, and a long tradition of teaching centered on the transmission of content. The NEM thus emerged not only as a curricular reform, but also as an attempt to rethink what it means to learn and teach within the Mexican public school system.
Six years after its launch, we asked ourselves what happens when these large pedagogical transformations actually reach the classroom. To answer that question, we turned to the report Reimagining Learning in Mexico. The New Mexican School Educational Reform, produced by Brookings Institution and Educación para Compartir as part of the international SPARKS project. Based on the analysis of two primary schools — one in Mexico City and another in Yucatán — the study attempts to understand how school cultures, educational system conditions, and beliefs about teaching ultimately shape the real implementation of a reform.
This article takes the Mexican case as a starting point to examine a much broader issue. Because the tensions surrounding the New Mexican School, which we will explore below, are not unique to Mexico. They are present today in many contemporary educational reforms. And they help explain why transforming teaching is often a much slower, more complex, and more contradictory process than education policies tend to imagine.
The Problem Was Not the Idea. It Was Turning It Into Practice
The first thing that must be clarified in order to understand the study is that it found broad acceptance of the New Mexican School model. Both teachers and families generally express agreement with many of its principles: the connection between school and community, active learning, student participation, and the incorporation of cultural contexts close to students’ lives.
Even the methodologies associated with the reform — such as project-based learning, interdisciplinary work, or community-centered approaches — generate interest among many teachers. In Yucatán, for example, several teachers describe how activities linked to everyday experiences or nearby cultural references generate greater participation and engagement among students.
However, sharing the goals of a reform does not necessarily mean having the conditions required to implement it.
A large part of the difficulties emerge precisely there, in the transition from pedagogical vision to everyday practice. Teachers in both schools describe a rushed implementation process, with little time to understand the new approaches, insufficient training, and materials that often failed to clarify how active methodologies should translate into daily classroom work. “Trying to understand it last year — it was chaos,” one teacher quoted in the report summarizes.
A sense of uncertainty runs through many of the testimonies collected by the study. Some teachers express doubts about how to balance project-based work with the teaching of foundational content. Others describe difficulties reorganizing schedules, classroom dynamics, or forms of assessment that for decades had operated under a completely different logic. Families, meanwhile, also perceived part of this initial disorientation. In Yucatán, one mother summarized the beginning of the reform this way: “not even the teachers themselves knew how to carry it out.”
None of this is unique to Mexico. In fact, the report reveals a recurring pattern in many contemporary reforms. Education policies often focus on defining new methodologies, new curricula, or new competencies, but transforming teaching practice requires something far more difficult to build: time, support, coherent materials, institutional stability, and spaces where teachers can experiment with new ways of teaching without having to improvise alone.
Educational reforms are not implemented on empty ground. They arrive in schools that already have organizational structures, pedagogical cultures, family expectations, and established ways of understanding what it means to teach and learn. And when new proposals fail to engage with those preexisting structures, change advances unevenly, partially, or contradictorily.
The problem, the report suggests, was not necessarily the pedagogical ambition of the reform. It was something much more complex: ensuring that this ambition could be sustained every single day inside real classrooms.
Educational reforms are not implemented on empty ground. They arrive in schools that already have organizational structures, pedagogical cultures, family expectations, and established ways of understanding what it means to teach and learn.
Reforms Also Collide With Invisible Habits
The report’s most interesting concept is probably that of “invisible pedagogical mindsets.” With this expression, the researchers attempt to describe something difficult to measure, yet decisive for understanding any educational transformation: the beliefs and habits that silently organize everyday school life.
They are not speaking only about methodologies or public policies. They are speaking about deeply rooted ideas regarding what it means to learn, how students should behave, what authority teachers hold, or how knowledge is organized within a classroom. These are practices so embedded in the daily functioning of schools that they often go unnoticed even by those participating in them.
This helps explain why educational reforms tend to advance unevenly. Changing a curriculum may take a few months. Changing ways of teaching built over decades is something entirely different.
In Mexico, this tension appears constantly throughout the testimonies collected by the study. Many teachers value the NEM’s emphasis on participation, projects, or connections with the community, while simultaneously expressing uncertainty toward less structured teaching models. Interdisciplinary work, curricular flexibility, or open-ended activities require continuous pedagogical decisions that were previously much more clearly defined through rigid programs and standardized sequences.
The difficulty does not necessarily lie in rejecting new methodologies. In many cases, the problem is that these new forms of teaching coexist with school structures still operating under older logics. Fragmented schedules, pressure to cover content, traditional forms of assessment, or deeply rooted family expectations continue organizing much of school experience even as pedagogical discourse changes.
Something similar occurs with families. The report finds surprisingly high support for the reform even among people who admit knowing little about it. Yet this acceptance coexists with highly consolidated ideas about what a school should look like: linear progression of content, centrality of the textbook, clear teacher authority, or learning that is easily visible and measurable. Reforms therefore do not arrive in an empty space. They arrive in school cultures that already had their own rules long before new curricula appeared.
The case of interculturality is especially revealing. The New Mexican School proposes incorporating community knowledge and Indigenous languages as part of the educational experience. Yet even in Yucatán, one of the contexts most strongly linked to Mayan culture, many teachers acknowledge feeling poorly prepared to teach in Indigenous languages and describe how the everyday use of Maya has declined among younger generations.
The challenge does not emerge only in materials or training. It also arises in relation to the kinds of knowledge historically recognized as legitimate within schools and those that have remained outside them for decades. Incorporating Indigenous languages, community knowledge, or local cultural references does not simply mean adding new content to the curriculum. It implies questioning a hierarchy of knowledge deeply rooted in many Latin American education systems, where schools have tended to privilege forms of knowledge considered universal, academic, or “modern,” while other forms of knowledge remained confined to family, community, or informal settings.
That is why interculturality is far more complex to implement than official documents sometimes suggest. It is not simply about translating materials or introducing occasional cultural activities. It involves redefining which experiences, languages, and ways of interpreting the world have a place inside schools. And this type of shift directly affects pedagogical traditions built over generations.
Brookings reveals precisely this tension: teachers who value the incorporation of local cultures, students who respond enthusiastically when references close to their everyday lives appear, but also school systems that for a long time were organized around other cultural and linguistic references.
What the Mexican Case Reveals About Educational Change
The significance of the New Mexican School extends beyond Mexico’s borders because it allows us to observe, almost in real time, some of the tensions currently crossing educational reforms around the world. Although contexts differ, the difficulties appearing in Mexico are recognizable in many systems attempting to introduce active pedagogies, digital transformation, or new learning models.
The study leaves at least five especially relevant lessons.
Changing the Curriculum Does Not Automatically Change Teaching
Educational reforms often begin with documents: new content, new competencies, new methodologies. But everyday school practice also depends on pedagogical habits built over years. Schedules, forms of assessment, authority dynamics, or family expectations continue organizing school experience even when official discourse changes. The Mexican case shows that transforming teaching involves much more than redesigning educational programs.
Active Pedagogies Need Conditions That Allow Them to Last
The report shows teachers interested in more participatory and contextualized methodologies, but also uncertainty about how to apply them in practice. Project-based learning or interdisciplinary work require time, coordination, appropriate materials, and continuous support. Without those conditions, many innovations end up depending exclusively on teachers’ individual efforts.
Teacher Training Cannot Be Limited to Explaining a Reform
One of the clearest findings of the study is that new methodologies also require learning processes for those who teach. It is not enough to present general guidelines or curricular manuals. Pedagogical reforms require spaces where teachers can experiment with new practices, adapt them to their contexts, and progressively rebuild their ways of teaching.
Institutional Stability Matters as Much as Innovation
Many Mexican teachers express doubts about the continuity of the reform and the possibility that it may change again with the next government. This perception is not insignificant. Schools rarely consolidate deep transformations when educational policies are perceived as temporary or politically unstable. Educational change requires time. And institutional time rarely coincides with political time.
No Innovation Arrives in an Empty System
Perhaps this is the report’s most important idea. Reforms do not land on neutral schools. They arrive in educational systems shaped by professional cultures, accumulated inequalities, authority structures, and historically rooted ways of understanding learning. The Mexican case shows that much of a reform’s success — or its limits — depends precisely on how it engages with those preexisting structures.
In that sense, the tensions surrounding the New Mexican School are not exclusively Mexican. The same gap between innovation and practice runs through many current debates on competencies, educational technology, or artificial intelligence in classrooms. The tools and pedagogical vocabularies may change, but the underlying challenge remains remarkably similar: ensuring that educational transformations truly take root in the everyday life of schools.
