Educational Coaching, a Pedagogical Shell Game

ByPablo Martínez

This editorial by Pablo Martínez originally appeared in the September 20, 2025 edition of La Jornada, Mexico’s premier left wing daily newspaper. The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Mexico Solidarity Project.

I once heard a professor criticize the inclusion of quality and excellence in Article 3 of the Constitution. He said that, although they sound positive, these terms are redundant and hide inequalities based on class, gender, and culture. “Quality” ended up being reduced to parameters of evaluation and control, subordinating pedagogy to technical indicators. However, unlike excellence, which operates as an elitist distinction, educational quality does enjoy solid recognition in international discussions and has served to assess relevance, equity, and relevance. It could be a path to improvement if it is freed from its technocratic bias and reframed from a pedagogical and social perspective, understood not as control, but as a commitment to equity and the right to learn, capable of guiding policies that respond to the needs of the majority and to the country’s cultural diversity.

Today, multiple courses and training programs are gaining momentum under a new concept: educational coaching. This methodology is presented as an innovative approach that seeks to “boost performance,” “empower students,” and “develop their full potential.” However, in practice, it translates into crude strategies that do little to change the social and working reality of teachers. Its motivational rhetoric promises support and transformation, but ultimately offers superficial solutions that ignore structural problems, such as administrative overload, lack of resources, wage inequalities, precarious working conditions, and so on.

Quality (misunderstood) places the onus on teachers to respond to external indicators; excellence places pressure on students to excel among their peers, and coaching challenges each individual to discover and exploit their potential. In all three cases, an individualizing narrative (“if you want, you can”) is upheld that obscures resource inequalities, cultural gaps, and historical discrimination based on gender and ethnicity. Under this logic, the motivational discourse of coaching does not represent a true innovation but rather reproduces the same illusion, blaming teachers and students for broader structural problems, such as overcrowded classrooms, lack of infrastructure, digital inequality, or a lack of community support.

Just as excellence distinguishes and quality controls, coaching proposes that it is enough to “discover one’s own potential” to transform reality, bypassing the structural conditions that limit teaching and learning.

The risk of the motivational mirage posed by educational coaching is similar to that of excellence discourses; they are based on a corporate vocabulary (performance, competencies, empowerment) that shifts attention away from the system’s real problems. Their appeal lies in the fact that they appear to be modern and positive solutions, but ultimately end up blaming both teachers and students for much broader structural deficiencies. If a student doesn’t improve, the explanation cannot be reduced to “lacking self-awareness” or “not fulfilling their potential”; what must be examined are the material and social conditions that limit learning.

To a certain extent, both quality and excellence have functioned as devices of distinction, civilization, and obedience. Excellence, my professor said, seeks to impose a culture of “good manners,” where the popular must aspire to models imposed from above, legitimizing obedience and merit as the only paths to recognition. Quality, for its part, is presented as technical and honorable knowledge, but in reality it operates as a surveillance mechanism that normalizes the idea that the majority (especially the teaching profession) must submit to external standards, almost like a Platonic Republic governed by experts. Both categories conceal a civilizing process that, beneath the appearance of neutrality, reproduces hierarchies of class and knowledge.

Educational coaching fits into this same logic, albeit under a more friendly guise. It is promoted as a horizontal alternative, based on empathy and motivation, but ultimately maintains the illusory nature of the old promises: holding the individual responsible for their success or failure. Just as excellence distinguishes and quality controls, coaching proposes that it is enough to “discover one’s own potential” to transform reality, bypassing the structural conditions that limit teaching and learning. In doing so, it becomes a new version of the same civilizing process, seemingly innovative formulas that, far from changing the social and employment situation of teachers and students, end up reinforcing inequality.

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