While Chicago communities try to figure out what it will mean if their schools are closed, a different debate is brewing in Mexico. Last week, the leader of Mexico’s teachers’ union--one of the most powerful in all of Latin America--was arrested on charges of embezzling millions of dollars in union funds. Her arrest came just after a set of sweeping education reforms aimed at breaking the union’s powerful hold on public education in Mexico. John Ackerman, a law professor at the Institute for Legal Research of the National Autonomous University of Mexico and columnist at La Jornada newspaper and Proceso magazine as well as a frequent contributor to US media, explains what this means for the future of the union and Mexico's education system in general.
