The shortages of days in the classroom and teachers, and the poverty of their schools and living conditions, provide for a very poor education for Venezuela's children and augur a significant lag for their performance in adult life and for the country's development. CREDIT: El Ucabista

By Humberto Márquez
CARACAS, Jul 10 2023 (IPS)

Hundreds of thousands of children and young people, and thousands of their teachers, drop out of regular schooling in Venezuela year after year, and most of those who remain go to the classroom only two or three days a week, highlighting the abysmal backwardness of education in the country.

“Why continue studying, to graduate unemployed and earn a pittance? We prefer to get into a trade, make money, help our parents; there are a lot of needs at home,” Edgar, 19, who with his brother Ernesto, 18, has been gardening in homes in southeastern Caracas for three years, told IPS."The education crisis did not begin in March 2020 with the COVID-19 pandemic. These are problems that form part of the complex humanitarian emergency that Venezuela has been experiencing for many years." -- Luisa Pernalete

A study this year by the non-governmental organization Con la Escuela (With the School), in seven of Venezuela’s 24 states -including the five most populated- found that 22 percent of students skip classes to help their parents, and in the 15-17 age group this is the case for 45 percent of girls.

In the school where teacher Rita Castillo worked, in La Pomona, a shantytown in the torrid western city of Maracaibo, “for many days in a row there is no running water, there are blackouts, and it’s impossible to use the fans to cool off the classrooms,” she told IPS.

The classes in the school are divided into 17 to 25 children each: the first three grades of primary school attend on Mondays and Tuesdays, the next three grades on Wednesdays and Thursdays, and Fridays make up for whoever missed class the previous days. That is in the mornings; secondary school students attend during the hot afternoons.

These are the first steps towards the definitive dropout of students: 1.2 million in the three years prior to 2021 and another 190,000 in the 2021-2022 school year, with 2022-2023 still to be estimated, with no signs of a reversal in the trend.

“The dropout rate is also high in secondary schools in Caracas, and the students who remain often pass from one year to the next without having received, for example, a single physics or chemistry class, due to the shortage of teachers,” Lucila Zambrano, a math teacher in public schools in the populous western part of the capital, told IPS.

Authorities in the education districts are increasingly calling on retired teachers to return to work, “but who is going to return to earn for 25, 20 or less dollars a month?” Isabel Labrador, a retired teacher from Colón, a small town in the southwestern state of Táchira, told IPS.

Currently, the monthly food basket costs 526 dollars, according to the Documentation and Analysis Center of the Venezuelan Federation of Teachers.

The infrastructure and equipment of many schools is seriously affected in different areas of Venezuela, and its recovery is essential as a space not only for students to obtain knowledge but also for the socialization and coexistence of students, teachers and representatives. CREDIT: E. Carvajal / CPV

Teachers held colorful street protests in the first few months of 2023, demanding decent salaries and other benefits acquired by their collective bargaining agreement, and these demands remain unheeded as the school year ends this July.

Teachers earning ridiculously small salaries, high school dropout rates, rundown infrastructure, lack of services, loss of quality and a marked lag in the education of children and young people are the predominant characteristics of Venezuelan public education today.

But “the education crisis did not begin in March 2020 with the COVID-19 pandemic. These are problems that form part of the complex humanitarian emergency that Venezuela has been experiencing for many years,” Luisa Pernalete, a trainer and researcher at the Fe y Alegría educational institution for decades, told IPS.

Numbers in red

In the current school year, enrollment in kindergarten, primary and secondary education totaled 7.7 million, said Education Minister Yelitze Santaella, in this country which according to the National Institute of Statistics has 33.7 million inhabitants, but only 28.7 million according to university studies.

The difference in the numbers may be due to the migration of more than seven million Venezuelans in the last decade, according to United Nations agencies – a figure that the government of President Nicolás Maduro considers exaggerated, although it has not provided an alternative number.

The attraction or the need to migrate, in the face of the complex humanitarian emergency – whose material basis begins with the loss of four-fifths of GDP in the period 2013-2021 – also mark the desertion of students and teachers.

In the three-year period ending in 2021 alone, 166,000 teachers (25 percent of the total) and 1.2 million students (15 percent of the number enrolled at the time), dropped out, according to a study by the private Andrés Bello Catholic University (Ucab) in Caracas, ranked as the top higher education center in the country.

Con la Escuela estimates that at least 40 percent of the teachers who have quit have already emigrated to other countries.

Educational coverage among the population aged three to 17 years continues to decline: 1.5 million children and adolescents between those ages were left out of the education system in the 2021-2022 period. The hardest hit group is children between three and five years of age, where coverage amounts to just 56 percent.

Public school teachers, whose basic salary barely exceeds 20 dollars per month, have held massive protests in Caracas and other cities in the country demanding a living wage and compliance with the provisions of their collective bargaining agreement. CREDIT: M. Chourio / Efecto Cocuyo

According to official figures, there are 29,400 educational institutions in the country, of which 24,400 are public, with 6.4 million students and 542,000 teachers; and 5,000 are private, with 1.2 million students and 121,000 teachers.

They cover three years of early education, six years of primary school and five years of secondary school. It was decreed 153 years ago that primary education should be free and compulsory.

According to Ucab and Con la Escuela, 85 percent of public schools do not have internet, 69 percent have acute shortages of electricity and 45 percent do not have running water. There are also deficiencies in health services (93 percent), laboratories (79 percent) and theater or music rooms (85 percent).

Surveying 79 public schools in seven states, Con la Escuela found that 52 percent of the bathrooms are in poor condition, 35 percent of the schools do not have enough bathrooms, and two percent have no bathrooms.

In 19 percent of the schools classes have been suspended due to the damage to the toilets, and 34 percent do not have sewage pipes.

“Water is the service that generates the most suspension of classes in Venezuela,” Pernalete said. “Classes can be held without electricity in the school, but you can’t do without water, and if the service fails in the community or in the whole town, then it’s hard for teachers to go to work or the families don’t send their children to school.”

The backpack decorated with the tricolor Venezuelan flag, which is given to primary school students in the country’s public schools, is often carried by immigrants, such as these walking along a Colombian highway, as many students and teachers, in addition to dropping out of school, go abroad. CREDIT: JRS

Con la Escuela also found that 36 percent of the classrooms are insufficient for the number of youngsters enrolled, 44 percent of the schools have classrooms in poor condition and 50 percent reported desks in poor condition.

Moreover, the Ucab investigation found “ghost schools”, which appear in the Education Ministry figures but are actually only empty shells.

“We have gone to the field with the list of these schools and we have found that they no longer exist. There are just four walls standing,” said Eduardo Cantera, director of Ucab’s Center for Educational Innovation.

From precariousness to backwardness

If the salary of a new teacher in a public school is 20 dollars a month, those who are five levels higher in the ranks do not earn much more, just 30 or 35 dollars, although they do receive some bonuses that are not part of the salary.

In Caracas, private schools – which serve from kindergarten to the end of high school – a teacher earns about 100, maybe 200 or more dollars, depending on seniority, hours of work, and the families’ ability to pay.

The drop in wages cuts across the entire labor spectrum. The basic minimum is around five dollars a month, although there are food bonuses, and the average salary of formal sector workers is around 100 dollars.

It is a difficult figure to reach for many of those who work in the informal sector of the economy – 60 percent of the country’s workers according to the Survey of Living Conditions that Ucab carried out in 2022 among 2,300 households across the country.

A view of the María Auxiliadora school in a middle and upper-middle class area of Caracas. In private education, families must make extraordinary contributions to improve teachers’ salaries and thus hold onto them. CREDIT: Oema

It is a consequence of the gigantic setback of the Venezuelan economy – GDP shrank by four-fifths between 2013 and 2021 – compounded by almost three years of hyperinflation between 2017 and 2020, and depreciation that liquefied the value of the local currency, the bolivar, and led to a costly de facto dollarization.

Although public education is formally free, parents must contribute a few dollars each month to help maintain the schools. In private schools, prices are raised under the guise of extraordinary fees – the only way to obtain funds that make it possible for them to hold onto their teachers.

Pernalete says that in the interior of the country many teachers have to walk up to an hour to get to school -there is no public transportation or they can’t afford to take it-, not to mention the lack of water or electricity in their homes, or the absence of or the poor quality of internet connection, if they can afford it, or the lack of other technological resources.

And if they do have internet, that’s not always the case for their students.

Damelis, a domestic worker who lives in a poor neighborhood in Los Teques, a city neighboring Caracas, has three children in school. Some teachers, she told IPS, assign homework through a WhatsApp group, but in her home no one has a computer, internet or smartphone.

What is the result? The initial reading assessment test that Ucab recently administered to 1,028 third grade students nationwide showed high oral and reading comprehension (82 and 85 percent, respectively), but low reading aloud and decoding skills (43 and 53 percent).

More than 40 percent of the students only read 64 words per minute or less, when they should read 85 or more. Con la Escuela applied the test to 364 students in Caracas and the neighboring state of Miranda, and the children only read 48 words per minute.

There is also discouragement among teachers. The main public teaching university in the country has almost no applicants. In the School of Education at Ucab, the first two years have been closed due to a lack of students, despite the fact that the university offers scholarships to those who want to train as teachers.

What can be done? “The physical recovery of schools should be one of the first steps to guarantee their fundamental function: to serve as a center for socialization and meeting of teachers, students and representatives around the teaching-learning process,” said Cantera.

“Otherwise, the consequences will be very serious for the country’s development,” he said.

Labrador said she observes “a gradual privatization of education, it is no longer truly free,” and the disparity between public and private education is increasing inequality in a country where in the second half of the 20th century public education stood out as the most powerful lever for social ascent.

Pernalete said it is a matter of complying with the 1999 Constitution, which stipulates that workers’ salaries must be sufficient to live on and establishes the government’s commitment to the right to education, as it states that education and work are the means for the realization of the government’s goals.

Students from this school, the Normal Rural Raúl Isidro Burgos teachers college in Ayotzinapa, Mexico, were attacked by the police in the city of Iguala in the state of Guerrero. Six were killed, 25 were injured and 43 are still missing. Credit: Pepe Jiménez/IPS

By Daniela Pastrana
MEXICO CITY, Oct 17 2014 (IPS)

The images filled the front pages of Mexico’s newspapers: 61 half-dressed state policemen kneeling, with their hands tied, in the main square of the town of Tepatepec in the central state of Hidalgo, while local residents threatened to burn them alive.

It was Feb. 19, 2000. The reason the townspeople were furious was the police occupation of the Normal Rural Luis Villarreal rural teachers college in the town of El Mexe, and the arrest of 176 of the students, who had been on strike because of the government’s announcement that enrollment would be reduced.

Between that episode and an incident on Monday Oct. 13 in the southwest state of Guerrero, when teachers, students and local residents of the town of Ayotzinapa set fire to the state government building, there has been a history of repression and criminalisation of the country’s poorest students: the sons and daughters of small farmers who study to become teachers in rural schools.

“It’s built-up anger,” Etelvina Sandoval, a researcher at the Universidad Pedagógica Nacional, Mexico’s national university for teacher training, told IPS. “For years there has been a campaign against the rural teachers colleges and they have been scorned for what they do. In the view of the government, they are very expensive, and the students have to constantly fight to keep their schools running. And no one says anything because they’re poor kids.”

Guerrero is the third-least developed state in the country, and one of the most politicised. It has been the birthplace of social movements, and four decades ago it was one of the targets of the “dirty war” – a time of military repression of opponents of the government, which left a still unknown number of dead and disappeared.“For years there has been a campaign against the rural teachers colleges and they have been scorned for what they do. In the view of the government, they are very expensive, and the students have to constantly fight to keep their schools running. And no one says anything because they’re poor kids.” -- Etelvina Sandoval

It is also one of the most violent states. And since Sept. 26 it has been in the global spotlight, after police in the city of Iguala attacked three buses full of students fom the Normal Rural Raúl Isidro Burgos teachers college of Ayotzinapa.

The reason for the attack is not yet clear. But it was reported that the police handed over a group of students to the Beltrán Leyva drug cartel.

In the clash with police, six people were killed, 25 were injured, and 43 mainly first-year students went missing.

Implicated in the massacre were Mayor José Luis Abarca and his wife María de los Ángeles Pineda, both of whom are fugitives from justice and who, according to investigations, were on the cartel’s payroll.

In the search for the students, 23 mass graves have been found so far, containing dozens of corpses.

“The indiscriminate violence against the civilian population that we saw during the six-year term of Felipe Calderón (2006-2012) has been directed towards organised social movements since the change of government. What happened in Iguala was just a question of time,” said Héctor Cerezo, a member of the Cerezo Committee, an organisation that documents forced disappearances and the dirty war.

The young people who study at the rural teachers colleges – known as “normales” or normal schools – are the poorest students in the country, who receive training to educate poor “campesinos” or peasant farmers in the most marginalised and remote communities, where teachers who have trained in urban areas do not want to go.

The students are themselves campesinos whose only chance at an education is the normales, which were founded in 1921 and are the last bastion of the socialist education imparted in Mexico from 1934 to 1945.

In the normales, which function as boarding schools, and where students are given meals as well as a scholarship of three to seven dollars a day, the students are in charge.

They participate directly in administrative decision-making, and have established support networks among schools through the Federation of Socialist Campesino Students of Mexico, the country’s oldest student organisation, which has frequently been accused of churning out guerrillas.

Through its ranks passed legendary guerrillas like Lucio Cabañas, who in 1967 founded the Party of the Poor, and Genaro Vázquez (both of whom were graduates of the Ayotzinapa teachers college). Another was Misael Núñez Acosta, who studied at the “normal” in Tenería, in the state of Mexico, and in 1979 founded the Coordinadora Nacional de Trabajadores de la Educación teachers union and was killed two years later.

“They were created for that reason – to do political work and consciousness-raising. The students are very independent young people [in comparison with students at the urban ‘normales’] with very strict discipline,” said Sandoval, who added that the rural teachers colleges have been “a thorn in the side of the governments.”

Of the 46 original rural teachers colleges, only 15 are left. Half of them were closed after the 1968 student movement by then-president Gustavo Díaz Ordaz (1964-1970).

The ones that are still open have been waging a steady battle since 1999 to avoid being turned into vocational-technical schools. But the state governments have financially suffocated them, with the argument that the country doesn’t need more primary school teachers, because the declining birth rate has reduced student enrollment.

As a result, fires and other incidents have become common in the rural teachers colleges as the installations have become more and more rundown. In 2008, for example, two students died in a fire caused by a short circuit in the first rural school of its kind in Latin America, the Normal Rural Vasco de Quiroga in the northwest state of Michoacán.

“What I can say is that there are not enough teachers in the most remote areas,” Sandoval said. “There are communities who go for months without a teacher. In some places a ‘non-teacher’ covers the gap temporarily, working without any contract or fixed timeframe.”

The attack on the buses carrying students from the Ayotzinapa school has put President Enrique Peña Nieto’s human rights policy to the test.

The incident occurred in the context of growing tension caused by attempts by the latest governments to close down the school.

In January 2007, then state Governor Zeferino Torreblanca tried to reduce the number of students enrolled and declared that his government’s aim was to reduce the “studentocracy”. In November of that year, the anti-riot police cracked down on students when they demonstrated outside the state legislature.

On Dec. 12, 2011 the police killed two normal school students: phys-ed student Gabriel Echeverría de Jesús and primary education student Jorge Alexis Herrera Pino.

They were taking part in a roadblock to protest cuts in the school budget. In addition, Édgar David Espíritu Olmedo was seriously wounded, and 24 other students were beaten and injured.

“Ayotzinapa is standing up to fight for justice. The academic excellence that we are seeking cannot be conditioned on our political submission,” the Federation of Socialist Campesino Students of Mexico stated in a communiqué at the time.

No one was held responsible or punished for the deaths.

Nearly three years later, as they were getting ready to visit Mexico City to take part in the commemoration of the anniversary of the Oct. 2, 1968 massacre of students in Tlatelolco square in Mexico City, the students from the Normal Rural Raúl Isidro Burgos teachers college in Ayotzinapa were ambushed by municipal police, and the detained students, according to the investigations and testimony, were handed over to a criminal group that the mayor worked for.

Since then, there has been no sign of the 43 missing students.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes