By Marcela Valente
BUENOS AIRES, Apr 10 2002 (IPS)

Argentina’s economic collapse has driven middle-class students from private to public schools en masse this year, while thousands of poor children and teenagers have dropped out of the public school system.

The recession that began in 1998 led to a drastic decline in incomes, making it more and more difficult for middle-class families to meet the often steep tuition payments, and more than 100 private schools were forced to close their doors last year.

The number of middle-class children in public schools is “unprecedented” this year, reported the Buenos Aires city government’s secretary of education, Daniel Filmus.

But the flood of former private school students into the public education system will sadly be balanced out by the high drop-out rate among the poorer segments of the population, as many youngsters are forced into the informal labour market to help support their families, or simply cannot go to school because they are unable to afford shoes, school materials or bus money.

In addition, thousands of children of families from Bolivia, Chile, Peru and Uruguay have been pulled out of the schools as the immigrants return to their home countries after losing their jobs in crisis-stricken Argentina, which can no longer offer them the promise of a better life and broader opportunities.

Unemployment currently affects nearly one-quarter of the population in Latin America’s third largest economy, while 40 percent of the population of 37 million has fallen below the poverty line.

The growing desertion rate has not even been curbed by the offer of free meals at school, which began to be provided in recent years in an attempt to keep enrollment up as increasing numbers of children and adolescents were forced to work.

A study by the United Nations children’s fund (UNICEF) found that 50 percent of Argentine adolescents aged 13 to 17 do not complete their secondary studies.

High school principals report that it is becoming more and more common to have three 10th grade classes and just one 12th grade class – the last year of secondary school. (Grades one through nine are part of the primary education system in Argentina).

Like never before, the inability to afford basic elements like footwear, bus fare or school materials has become an insuperable obstacle keeping many youngsters out of school.

The need to help support the family is another reason mentioned by many drop-outs who teachers have found cleaning windshields at stoplights in Buenos Aires and other cities.

“We have never had so many desperate people coming to ask for school materials, especially men who are out of work and who don’t want their kids to drop out of school just because they don’t have a folder,” Pablo Moseinco, a high school math teacher, told IPS.

Moseinco works with a non-governmental organisation, La Lecheria, in Pacheco, an industrial suburb of Buenos Aires, which helps families keep their children in school.

María del Carmen Barrios, a mother of two, told IPS that “this year is terrible,” because although she was able to leave her 16- year-old daughter in school, she had to pull out her 15-year-old son as he did not have any minimally decent shoes to wear to school.

“Don’t even mention school materials, because that has become a luxury,” added Barrios, who lives in Pacheco.

Barrios has only been able to find sporadic work cleaning houses on an hourly basis. Nevertheless, she does not qualify for a state welfare subsidy for unemployed heads of households, because the cutbacks in public spending have forced the state to put higher priority on families with more children.

Without bus fare money, Barrios’ daughter – the lucky one who stayed in school – has to walk six kilometres a day to continue her studies.

School desertion began to become a noticeable problem in 1995, and the drop-out rate has soared with the economic crisis, the worst in Argentine history.

The latest statistics are especially alarming. In the central province of Buenos Aires, the country’s most populous province, the proportion of secondary students who graduated plunged from 88 percent in 2000 to 65 percent in 2001.

The extent of the problem became all too clear in March, the start of the southern hemisphere school year, when the Union of Education Workers – the teachers’ union – found that 150,000 secondary students in the province of Buenos Aires had left school.

That meant the number of classes had shrunk, and more teachers would be out of work.

Teachers began to engage in a flurry of new activities, such as handing out flyers urging students to stay in school, or going door to door looking for teenagers to convince them not to drop out.

UNICEF joined in the campaign, and in first division professional football matches in March asked the players to enter the stadiums with signs reading “if you go to school, YOU are the idol.”

The sign was also carried at the start of the school year by students wearing the traditional public primary school uniform, a white tunic.

Desertion has hit some schools particularly hard. In the Don Orione Middle School in Almirante Brown, in the province of Buenos Aires, only five students signed up for the 75 spots open for those opting for the economy major in high school.

In the José C. Paz Technical School, also on the outskirts of the city of Buenos Aires, there were only enough students for six classes, compared to 11 last year.

The teachers’ union says that another element contributing to the desertion was the elimination of scholarships for lower-income adolescents.

The government of the province of Buenos Aires cut from this year’s budget the scholarships it had been granting to more than 100,000 students since 1998, amounting to 100 pesos, worth 100 dollars before the devaluation.

Math teacher Moseinco with La Lecheria told IPS that teenagers were also suffering the impact of a reform of the educational system implemented in the 1990s with the aim of increasing enrollment.

Prior to the reform, primary school went up to seventh grade, after which there were five years of high school.

The reform expanded primary school to nine years, and students must pass all of their exams before they can continue on to secondary school, which was cut from five to three years, in which students must choose their orientation, such as economy, science or communication.

“The kids come out of ninth grade with a really weak foundation, and the leap to secondary school is enormous, and they find that they just can’t make it academically,” said Moseinco.

“Of course the scholarships encouraged them to make the enormous effort to continue, but this year, without that incentive, they think why should I stay if it is so difficult?”

Moseinco pointed out that students who have not completed all of their ninth grade coursework and passed all of their exams don’t flunk out, but are left in a kind of “limbo” that invites them to drop out.

He also noted that the difficult economic and social conditions in which many youngsters live do not provide an ideal environment in which to study, or incentives to stay in the world of learning.

Some experts fear that schools will merely end up spitting out poor children, even though the public education system is based on the principle of offering equal opportunities to all.

Data from the National Census and Statistics Institute indicates that in the past year, the proportion of minors living in poor households soared from 22 to 52 percent.

With many lower-income youngsters neither attending school nor working in the formal economy, they become more and more invisible to society, and even lose status within their own homes.

These adolescents are being “pushed towards a great big nothing,” warned representatives of the teachers’ union, who called on authorities to design a campaign to curb school desertion before it is too late.

Excerpt: