A review of the main educational policy measures applied in CABA, province of Buenos Aires and at the national level shows that the efforts of Horacio Rodríguez Larreta, María Eugenia Vidal and Mauricio Macri, respectively, were oriented to apply strong adjustments in resourceswith the closure of establishments and programs that sought to equalize knowledge, and without resolving underlying problems.
Although in the public debate its leaders frequently assure that “children have to be in school” which they consider “the central tool to combat poverty in Argentina”, there are countless measures that, placed in a line of time, show a deliberate and constant action against public education and a deep abyss between words and facts.
Macri
Mauricio Macri was in charge of the national government between 2016 and 2019. At this stage, a series of measures that affected access to the right to education for Argentines. His look at public education is synthesized in this unfortunate phrase from 2017: “there is a terrible inequality, of those who can go to private school versus the one who has to fall into public school“. If you look at what happened in that period of time, it is possible to point out the following milestones:
*2016: began the layoffs in the Conectar Igualdad program. Workers in the area warned about its emptying. Although the national government denied it, that year the program’s budget was reduced by 35 percent. In addition, the funds allocated to the program fell by 7 points to progress. The budget items allocated to infrastructure suffered a drastic nominal adjustment of 33 percent in 2016, without even considering inflation.
*2017: The attack against the program that sought to bring knowledge and technological tools to students continued, and its budget was reduced by 14 percent. Besides Progresar funds fell again by 30 percent. In 2017, infrastructure items grew, but without compensating for accumulated inflation. In the 2015/2017 period, transfers, including inflation, suffered a 17 percent cut.
*2018: once again the funds of the Conectar Igualdad program were reduced by 30 percent. Also that year the national teachers’ parity came to an end: by means of a decree, the Government eliminated the negotiation of the national minimum salary for teachers, a floor for the entire country. “They are repealing the national parity by decree. It violates freedom of association and the law on union organizations,” said CTERA at the time.
*2019: again the Conectar budget was reduced by almost 30 percent, which will then be permanently closed. Through a decree, the end of the initiative was made official, which in five years delivered more than five million computers to public school students. That year there was also a strong budget adjustment in education, from 4.4 percent of the total budget in 2015 to only 3.7 percent. In real terms, it implied a drop of 26 percent. Progresar funds were also reduced by another 45 percent.
*False promises. Although in 2016 the national government promised to build 3,000 kindergartens, by 2019 they had been replaced by the construction of 10,000 classrooms, which in the end were not fully built either, barely reaching 2,000.
*In all this framework there were union mobilizations that were repressed, like when teachers set up an itinerant school in front of Congress. The Secretary General of SUTEBA, Roberto Baradel, declared then: “it is a shame, they threw pepper spray in the face of the Education Workers.”
*Se eliminated the Ministry of Science and Technologyalong with eight other ministries such as Health and Labor, which became secretariats.
*In 2019, At that time, 80 percent of Argentine teachers were below the poverty line. The salary drop made it impossible for the normal development of educational activities.
Vidal
In the province of Buenos Aires, the Cambiemos government, headed by María Eugenia Vidal, implemented a educational policy that hit public education hard. The former governor herself questioned the sense of building new universities in the Province since, according to what she said, “We all know that no one who is born into poverty makes it to college.”
*Adjustment in the budget: for 2017, it represented 24.3 percent of provincial spending, which implied a reduction of 5.5 percent compared to the average for the years of the previous government, of Daniel Scioli, which showed 29.8 percent.
*2018: eight schools were closed on the Delta islands, in San Fernando, followed by the closure of 39 rural schools in the Provincethis when there were ten days left before the beginning of the school year, with the risk that the students would be left out of the educational system that year.
*2018-2019: carried out a policy based on the closure of courses and even entire careers in different higher institutes of the province of Buenos Aires. In San Nicolás, for example, the History Faculty at ISFD 12 was closed. This measure went hand in hand with the closure of high schools for adults.
*2019: the closure of Casa Huerta, educational extension of the Middle School No. 8 of the town. From the local ruling party they argued that the measure was due to changes applied by the Vidal administration in secondary education.
larreta
In the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires, the government of Horario Rodríguez Larreta already accumulates a long sequence of measures that, year after year, account for the lack of response to structural problems that guarantee the right to education in the capital of the country. “There will be no dialogue under extortion,” said the Buenos Aires chief in 2022 to refer to the demonstrations of students who complained about the poor building conditions.
*2014: Given the lack of vacancies, the Buenos Aires government improvised in response promote durlock classrooms in the corridors of the Bernasconi school. In addition, emergency rooms for kindergarten and first grade were built.
*2016: from the Multisectoral for Public Education, families, teachers and unions demanded vacancies for all in schools and denounced that the Implementation of the online school pre-registration system was part of a plan to empty and privatize education.
*2017: “crowd” classrooms due to lack of vacancies. In a Buenos Aires garden, the government decided to bring together 4-year-old students, who had no vacancies, with the 5-year-old rooms. At that time, the parents denounced that they were not consulted to find out what the new educational project consisted of. That year there was a strike and a massive mobilization of teachers in the City, which achieved 90 percent support.
*2018: no vacancies again, The waiting list in Buenos Aires public schools doubled. The local government launched the “Educational Transformation Plan”, which involved the closure of 29 teachers. CABA was the only district where, in ten years, the enrollment to be a teacher did not increase and Larreta blamed the teachers for “lack of vocation.” This year 14 schools were closed, leaving hundreds of teachers without work, including commercial schools, courses in high schools and night high schools. The budget was reduced by 3 percent in real terms compared to 2015.
*2019: Larreta advances against the Technical Training Institutes. Five institutes were merged: No. 4, located at Trelles 948, a few meters from Plaza Irlanda; the N° 9, of Venezuela 771, in San Telmo; 16, Lascano 4044, in Monte Castro; IFTS 22 at Los Patos 3080, Parque Patricios neighborhood; and No. 29, Yerbal 25, in Caballito. Besides, a school for children with disabilities was closed, the only educational center of these characteristics in the southern part of the city. The Education budget fell again by 5 percent, in real terms, compared to the previous year.
*2020: another was reduced 10 percent of the Education budget. Around the end of that year, a judicial ruling determined that the Buenos Aires government was obliged to grant a vacancy to those who did not get it by lottery only if they showed that they could not pay the fee for a private school, affecting the families that complained to the State. a place for your children.
*2021: The Education budget was reduced by 5.5 percent, in real terms, compared to the previous year.
*2022: legislators and unions denounced that 50,000 seats are missing in public schools. From the Observatory of the Right to the City they affirmed that there is an “indirect privatization” of the Buenos Aires educational system through the payment of subsidies to private schools.
The attack against public education by the governments of Cambiemostoday called Together for Change, is forceful: systematic cuts in budget items for education, closure of establishments, loss of income, job sources and repression of workers in the sector and stigmatization of students who demand improvements .
* CEPA members