Barbara Anderson

Delfina's subtractions

Since his arrival at the SEP, there are fewer students, fewer teachers and fewer schools in the entire Education System. Where are the almost 900 thousand students who dropped out of the classroom?

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Did you think that the Secretary of Education only knew how to add up 'mandatory supports'? Well, no, she also knows how to subtract. Since her arrival at the SEP, there are fewer students, fewer teachers and fewer schools in the entire Education System. Where are the almost 900,000 students who dropped out of the classroom?

Monday is International Education Day and I thought it was a good opportunity to review theThird Report of the SEP, which was presented in September last year, but I do not recall that the results that make up this 156-page document have generated any indignation.

And yes, it is a brutality. Because the entire educational system of the country had leaks, had cracks through which people (students and teachers), infrastructure and content were lost.

The cycle that runs from September 1, 2020 to August 31, 2021 was the worst of the last six school periods to date; only in the previous one (2020/21) 847 thousand students nationwide stopped taking classes: 656 thousand in Basic Education (-2.6% of the total of 24.6 million students), 160 thousand in Higher Secondary Education (-3.1%) and 31 thousand in Higher Education (-0.8%).

The highest dropouts occurred in the State of Mexico (-161,418 students), Puebla (-75,374) and Mexico City (-67,973).

If we take into account that in this past school year there were 190 school days, every day 4,371 students dropped out of school in this country.

Would it merit an analysis, an evaluation, an investigation? Of course it would, although we know it will never happen.

These figures are a scandal, especially considering that the Aprende en Casa I, II and III plan via national television was neither a success nor even less susceptible to any final evaluation by the authorities.

Although the Mexican education system is one of the largest, most complex and fragmented in all of Latin America, it is true that there are classroom-by-classroom survey mechanisms.

Otherwise, we would not know that there were fewer teachers: 9,172 teachers stopped teaching last cycle (from 2,071,715 to 2,062,543).

Did you know that in this school term alone, 1,208 schools were closed, almost all of them in Basic Education?

Fewer students, fewer teachers, fewer schools and fewer programs: this government has eliminated the Full-Time Schools (PETC), the National Program for School Coexistence (PNCE), the Program for Attention to Diversity in Indigenous Education (PADEI), the Program for Educational Attention to the Migrant School Population (PAEPEM) and the Program for the Development of Significant Learning in Basic Education (DASEB), intended to serve students in the most marginalized areas. Yes, where are the most forgotten and poorest communities, to which the current government promised to return the lost schooling.

In the 2020/21 school year everything fell but the money: while in 2020 the National Education Expenditure (NEE) was 1,359,664.3 million pesos, in 2021 it grew more than inflation (an increase of 8.6%) to 1,526,546.8 million pesos.

And for this cycle there is more money, 1.9% extra, but it is not to return those almost 900,000 students to the classrooms but for infrastructure expenses -which is not evaluated either and is deficient in half of the educational centers- and scholarships (where there is no follow-up to ensure that they effectively serve to eradicate school dropouts).

At the end of last year, the organization Mexicanos Primero held a forum ("Theft from schools. A failure for girls and boys" ("Robo a las escuelas.), where it broke down how the SEP will spend its budget this year: "what it shows is that there is more money for scholarships and for facilities (and still, in terms of facilities, with serious problems to be solved regarding the targeting and opacity for the delivery of resources) but without the complement and culmination that there should be in the daily activities of girls and boys to fulfill their right to learn", said David Calderón, president of the civil organization.

Not only that, it adds that nine programs disappeared in the turbulent river of the pandemic, five of which meant a reduction of 21,982 million pesos during 2021, affecting 4.3 million children and young people (equivalent to the enrollment of Nuevo León and the State of Mexico combined).

In the midst of the worst pandemic of the century, nowhere in SEP's Third Work Report is there an asterisk mentioning the number of students who were infected or died from COVID-19. Nor of the teachers or professors or the rest of the secretariat's personnel.

Is it so complicated to survey all the schools in the country? Does nobody care about the correlation between health and education, between education and employment, between education and poverty?

It seems not. There are 900,000 Mexicans who confirm this.