(Universidad Pedagógica Nacional, México)

Abstract: This essay discusses a line of research in education that has gained importance across the world, and which for countries such as Mexico, represents the possibility of socio-cultural and political transformation: that is educational quality. This has become a vision of the future which, due to various factors, has not been achieved and continues as the promised land of political speeches and initiatives flaunted as educational reforms or new educational models. The newly placed emphasis on the concept of educational quality finds its context in the 1990s, at least in Mexico; never-the-less the results to date indicate that our National Educational System (SEN) lacks quality. I wish to discuss one possible reason for this deficiency. That is overlooking the right to an education and failing to account for it on a political and conceptual level first, before thinking about educational quality, most importantly because the right to education functions as a vital link to realizing the much-sought-after quality, and secondly, because its achievement is a matter of social justice.