EDUCATION-PERU: Teacher Quality a Hostage to Controversy

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Abraham Lama

LIMA, Jan 10 2002 (IPS) - The call for applicants to fill 35,000 teaching posts in Peru’s public education system has triggered a tough debate between the government and the teachers’ union, posed as an either-or choice between labour rights and education quality.

The Education Workers’ Syndicate of Peru (SUTEP), the country’s largest and most outspoken teachers’ union, condemned the Education Ministry’s public call aimed at filling 35,000 of the 56,000 teaching posts now held by individuals who do not hold a teaching degree and were hired under temporary contracts.

SUTEP proposed, as an alternative, that the posts should be given to those who score highest on a test taken only by the temporary-status teachers.

State-run primary education in Peru involves 280,000 teachers, 224,000 of whom are graduates of university-level institutions and hold stable appointments.

“The 56,000 temporary teachers were hired to cover the schools’ urgent needs and were told at the time that their jobs were not permanent. The idea is that, over the course of this year and next, all teaching staff will hold degrees in education,” said Juan Abugattas, assistant minister of Education.

Abugattas stressed that the teachers who are working under provisional terms are not excluded from participation in the application process, “because their experience will be taken into account, but, because they lack the necessary academic degree, they must demonstrate their knowledge by taking an exam.”

The government of the deposed Alberto Fujimori (1990-2000) attempted to normalise the situation in 1999 with a standardised test, but just 16 percent of the 110,000 aspirants passed it, though 55,000 were teachers working within the educational system.

Nicolás Lynch, Minister of Education, and Olmedo Auris, leader of the state-run sector of SUTEP, are at the forefront of the controversy that in practice pits educational quality against the defence of labour rights.

Lynch and Auris were political colleagues in the 1980s, when both served as leaders in the Marxist-leaning United Left coalition.

The head of the education portfolio, alongside ministers Fernando Villarán (Labour), Fernando Rospigliosi (Interior), and Diego García Sayan (Foreign Relations), make up the leftist group within the government of Alejandro Toledo, a president whose economic policy follows neo-liberal lines.

The government official and the union leader accuse one another of conservativism. Lynch has described Auris as an anachronism, “because he defends the predominance of mediocrity and stands in the way of modernising the educational system.”

“We intend to incorporate into Peruvian education the concepts and techniques of the modern world and to enter the globalised cyber era, which means we must raise the standards for our teachers. However, 20 percent of our educators lack the training necessary to take up this challenge,” said Lynch.

“To assert that the priority in education is the job stability of these inadequate teachers, as the education workers’ union is doing, is retrograde,” he added.

Auris responded that “Lynch has turned into a bureaucrat in the service of economic neo-liberalism and has lost sight of the interests of the working class.”

Lynch retorted that “SUTEP is acting against the interest of the poorest sectors of the population because it is obstructing the renovation of the public education system, perpetuating the advantage of children whose parents can pay for private schooling.”

Lynch, a university professor and sociologist, managed to turn the discussion of how to increase the proportion of public school teachers with university degrees or equivalent experience into an ethics debate.

Auris replied that, “in the end, the right of the public school students to have better teachers will be achieved by increasing the teachers’ salaries and providing them with more training courses.”

Public education in Peru, which is free at the primary and secondary levels, serves approximately 6.5 million students through 48,000 schools distributed throughout this country of 25 million people.

Studies by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) show that public education in Peru is among the most worst in Latin America, with lowest test scores in language comprehension and mathematical logic.

Furthermore, reports by the country’s own Education Ministry state that 31 percent of the students currently in the primary and secondary system will not pass the courses they are studying.

The ministry also found that 48 percent of the students that began primary school in 1988, and were to have graduated from secondary school last year, dropped out of the educational system at some point during the last 12 years.

Given this reality, Abugattas stresses that “a real transformation is necessary for public education. We cannot continue patching up the system if we want the poor sector of the population to have access to a quality education.”

Auris, meanwhile, emphasises that the deficiencies can be explained by the meagre salaries of Peruvian teachers, “who are the worst paid in the region, receiving an average of 200 dollars a month.”

“With wages like that, we cannot demand much from them,” he commented.

“As long as they are paid so little, the best element – the most talented teachers – will leave education to dedicate themselves to other activities. As such, if we want to improve the quality of our teachers, we must increase their salaries instead of requiring a difficult exam,” said Auris.

In keeping with this premise, Auris is asking that the Education Ministry’s call for applicants waive minimum educational requirements for the aspirants and that the jobs be awarded to the 35,000 temporary teachers who score highest on the exam.

Auris also disagrees with Lynch’s proposal to include parents in the process of evaluating the would-be teachers, asserting that “the parents are not familiar with the pedagogical method and are not qualified to conduct these evaluations.”