MEXICO CITY — All over Mexico, children have begun making their way to school for the start of a new year — many stepping into run-down buildings without running water, new textbooks or trained teachers.
Spending is not the issue. Mexico budgets more for education, as a proportion of gross domestic product, than Brazil, Spain and even Switzerland. So where does the money go?
According to one calculation now appearing on a new “abuse meter” — a giant electronic billboard hovering over a busy intersection here in the capital — about $2.8 billion annually goes into the pockets of 298,174 no-show teachers and administrators who collect pay without working.
“It’s the robbery of the century, and it’s every year,” said Claudio X. González Guajardo, president of Mexicanos Primero, an educational advocacy organization responsible for the abuse meter. “The corruption is massive.”
Mr. González, an erudite critic with a professorial air, has been condemning educational waste for a long time, with a range of evidence. Data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development has long identified Mexico as an educational underperformer, with 93.3 percent of its education budget spent on staffing — more than any other member country in the organization — even as basic school needs go unmet.
According to the government’s recent education census, nearly a third of Mexico’s public schools lack drinkable water. Roughly 11 percent have no electricity, and in some indigenous areas of Chiapas and Oaxaca, the infrastructure problems are far worse.
But the abuse meter is an unusually brash and precise critique. With its Times Square-like lights displaying a running tally of money lost to waste and corruption since the first day of school on Aug. 17, the large billboard is a 24/7 stab at populist complaint, using shame to spawn outrage.
With a website and the #abusometro hashtag on Twitter, the campaign is yet another sign that Mexican civil society is getting more sophisticated. And it also highlights the divide between a growing and digitized middle class — which expects transparency, data-driven decisions and speedy results — and an old guard in government that still relies largely on secrecy and paperwork.
“Citizens have learned that democracy offers many ways for them to voice their views, even in forceful and assertive ways,” said Rubén Gallo, a professor of Latin American culture at Princeton University. “This, combined with a Latin code of honor, means that shaming a corrupt politician through inventions like the abusómetro is a perfect combination of the new — democratic awareness — and the traditional — a code of honor, in which an enemy can be publicly humiliated.”
The Mexican government has not responded to the abuse meter yet, but Mr. González said he had been told that officials were paying attention. The numbers he used actually were from the educational census conducted by government surveyors in advance of a recent educational reform law; many teachers strongly opposed the law, camping out in Mexico City’s main plaza for weeks in protest.
Now, the evidence that the government compiled to help push through the law, which is supposed to add evaluation and training for future teachers, is being used to demand that officials go even further, right now, to clean up the ranks.
That is clearly what many Mexican parents want. Walking past the spinning meter on a recent afternoon after picking up her 5-year-old son from school, Adriana Reyes, 35, said she was optimistic about the changes over the long term but felt that the government needed to move more quickly, to make schools better.
“They brag about all the money spent on education, but the quality never improves,” she said. Looking back at the meter, which showed 440,186,899 pesos (more than $33 million) wasted with the first week of school still not over, she added: “There is change. It’s just so slow.”
Luis Urrieta Jr., a professor of education and Latin American studies at the University of Texas, said Mexican officials may be moving quietly and privately because the level of transparency offered with the education census is already more than Mexico is used to. He added that the educational bureaucracy, more than teachers, needed to be held accountable for the corruption. Yet, the bureaucracy must also be relied upon to enact the broader changes, making for a delicate balancing act.
Some experts worry that cracking down too hard and fast could undermine the project. After decades of relying on nepotism and patronage, with jobs passed down among families — and some even collecting the salaries of long-dead relatives — cutting people off, especially in poor rural areas, could lead to another round of protests that would threaten to bring the whole school system to a grinding halt.
“Once you start exposing things that are problematic, the more vulnerable the institution becomes,” Dr. Urrieta said. “They’re probably just being very cautious with how much is being revealed and how they are going to deal with these cases.”
Like many in Mexico, however, Mr. González remains unsatisfied. He said he saw the ticker of the American national debt in New York years ago, and that his own abuse meter was inspired by frustration and impatience with a system that always seems to put off until tomorrow what should have been done yesterday.
He said the money spent on do-nothing teachers and administrators could be used to raise good teachers’ salaries; to build 24 new schools per day; or to equip every secondary school in the country with classrooms full of computers.
“They know — they know they have a massive problem,” Mr. González said. “They just need the political will to change it.”
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