In his recent opinion column entitled “Nothing Happens: At School, No Rewards and No Punishments,” Luciano Roman reflects on the serious problems caused by the ideological colonization of the educational system. It is not the first memoir to talk about this topic. There are more and more voices demanding something as basic as order and discipline in school, That teachers teach (not indoctrinate) and that students go on to learn (not just get through the school year). However, these sounds are still just drops of water in the desert, evaporating before they hit the ground. So what are we Argentines waiting for to correct the “educational tragedy” that Argentina is experiencing, according to the description given by Jim Echeverry in 1999 in his book of the same name? Will we postpone for another 20 years the decision to transform a school that today leaves too many children without the opportunities and knowledge they deserve?
Results are in sight. Argentina shows systematically low performance in the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) assessments, well below the OECD average. An increasing number of students finish primary school without acquiring basic skills, neither in mathematics nor in reading and writing.
The gap between public and private schools is widening. Those public schools that were once a source of pride and models for the region are today shunned by families who can choose alternatives, and this happens even with low-income families who choose to make efforts to enroll their children and keep them in private schools (especially parochial ones) that ensure, at the very least, greater adherence to educational delivery. What was once an engine of social progress has unfortunately become the only option for those who come from vulnerable backgrounds, and students who train there have far fewer opportunities to gain the skills needed to fully integrate into society and the labor market. This harmful mechanism only perpetuates the intergenerational cycle of poverty in which we are mired.
In the educational debate, the focus is usually on spending, but almost never on how it is spent or on the plans that led us to this situation. When we professionals try to analyze the education budget, we find a dark sea, where it is not easy to clearly define how each fund is managed.
In 1991, the transfer law began to reshape the panorama: the nation retained the universities and offloaded the burden of compulsory education to the regions. The Federal Law of 1993 deepened this path and established the principle of decentralization as a guiding principle. In 2005, the Education Finance Act promised to take investment from 4% to 6% of GDP by 2010 and distribute the effort between the nation and the provinces. A year later, the National Education Law sealed the scheme: compulsory secondary education, guaranteed 180 days of schooling, and rights everywhere. Drums beat, there was great applause, and smiles were photographed. At the same time, educational results continued to decline unabated. Because all those rules – so ambitious on paper – They end up being little more than declarations of desire. The commitment was not accompanied by demands. 6% of GDP was reached… and it was (and continues to be) poorly spent. The 180-day period has become a celebrated target when in fact actual non-compliance has become chronic. The presentation of the laws was long, noisy and expensive. But the quality of education has not improved. In almost everything, if something changes, it takes a turn for the worse.
At the same time, many academics and education professionals enthusiastically devote themselves to coining new terms and pseudo-technical jargon, as if difficulty of expression were in itself a virtue. In this frenzy, one of the defining terms was that the school should be “inclusive.” But the real result was completely different: Good teachers are exhausted and frustrated. They – those who still want to teach – are today the ones who denounce, bitterly, that they cannot do it. There are no clear rules, no consequences, and no real authority. They are required to pass it widely to inflate statistics that make it possible to declare that “no one is left out,” while more and more students graduate without the knowledge and skills that society and the labor market legitimately demand.
And so, at some point, we force ourselves to speak with pronouns, I think, more out of a lack of will to call a spade a spade than a genuine interest in embracing diversity. In the desire to “Do not stigmatize”, We end up masking the disaster we are creating with the one in two third graders who do not understand what they are reading, and with the one in two sixth graders who do not reach the minimum math level.
How long will we keep looking the other way while everything falls apart? How long will we be satisfied with not criticizing each other, repeating the comforting lie that “everything is fine,” and covering up the disaster we fuel ourselves every day? If we do not rise up against this decline, the decline will not stop: It will accelerate until it becomes irreversible. And let us be very clear: in a world that does not forgive mediocrity, and advances at a brutal speed, there will be no real progress, no potential country, and no future for anyone if we do not begin to fix what we have broken: the school.
Without a real school, there is no worthwhile inclusion: there is exclusion disguised as false promises. Without a real school, there will be no social mobility: there will only be an ever-larger mass of young people doomed to marginalization. We were shocked that in primary schools they “lower the line” and “everyone passes.”
While at the secondary level, only 10% of children manage to finish school on time and with acceptable knowledge of language and mathematics. By the time they get to college, if they get there, it’s too late: the damage is done. There is no more time. Either society (and not the professionals who say a lot and do little) will open its eyes and save the school – the real school, the school that teaches, the school that asks, the school that opens doors – or we will all sink. It’s now or never.
First Vice President of the National Academy of Education (ANE)