Is education reform needed? Minister Vergara explains her reasons

That is why he says he has “full confidence that all the people involved, both in the House of Representatives and the Senate, are going to put education at the center, they are going to make a national agreement that will allow this generation to bequeath quality education. and relevance. “I am certain that we will advance in the next legislature and that we will achieve consensus.”

Vergara emphasizes “that there are few countries that have declared education as a fundamental right” and Colombia is one of those with the Constitution of 1991 and Law 115 of 1994, and although the coverage of the system has improved, made up of the initial phases, preschool, basic (five grades of primary and four of secondary), middle (two final grades of high school), higher and education for work, there is still much to do .

Insufficient funding

The frustrated Statutory Law of Education sought to “regulate the fundamental right to initial, basic, secondary and higher education” through adequate financing.

The minister explains: “Of the 54 billion pesos (about 12,960 million dollars) that the nation invests in basic and secondary preschool education, only half a billion pesos (about 120 million dollars) are invested in educational quality”.

“There is a significant percentage of the budget that goes to paying payroll, to guaranteeing the basic operating conditions of the schools (…) The investment with today’s rules of the game is not as large as it should be” and that is why reform is needed, he assures.

It indicates that the Government’s goal “is to have 2,700,000 boys and girls in initial education and we are moving forward to guarantee that more than 2,200,000 enter (in that phase) throughout the national territory.”

However, “the biggest challenge” is in secondary education, which is the bridge to university.

“There are three million people at this moment who are neither studying nor working and who are at that age of studying and working”he says, and therefore, “the effort that the country must make to cover this entire population group is immense.”

This is partly because the majority of these young people “are in rural environments” and resources mainly reach “the closest, least dispersed places and cities.”

“The institution is not designed to guarantee continuity (of high school),” he says before giving another worrying figure: “It happens to us today that 8,000 schools do not have secondary education, they do not have the tenth and eleventh (grade)”.

Hope for better times

That is why he insists on “a lasting change in education” to increase the resources of the sector because, of the 44,000 educational centers in the country, “28,000 schools do not have connectivity.”

“The Government’s commitment to connecting these schools today needs to be accompanied by a similar investment in the coming years so that these technologies can be updated and maintained over time,” he says.

Taking his life story as a mirror, Vergara is confident that better times will come with the rescue of the Statutory Law in the next legislature.

“I come from a rural area, the department of Chocó, and I have been educated with immense difficulties; now I have a very privileged place which is to see how to make the change so that many of these young people can enter the education system not as an exception “says this sociologist from the Universidad del Valle with a doctorate from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst (USA) and a postdoctorate at Harvard University.