A tense week is going through the Minister of Education (s) Alejandra Arratia (Ind), in the midst of the crisis of the Local Public Education Services (SLEP) of Atacama. While this Tuesday she assured that the work committed in 60 schools will be ready on March 5, the president of the Copiapó Teachers’ College, Yariela Ardiles, distrusted such information with a severe criticism: “She lies blatantly.”
The minister(s) emphasized, on radio Infinity, two points that Mineduc promotes in the crisis. The first, that ““It has been possible to advance in a process designed on how the work committed to March 5 will be achieved”. And the second, that “The so-called strike is a measure of last ratio” so “the objective is that there is no loss of classes.”
His words did not go down well with either the National College of Teachers or the Copiapó Judiciary, where they assure that this “ultimate ratio” is just around the corner.
As Ardiles explains, on November 10, 2023 and after meeting with Arratia and the head of the portfolio Nicolás Cataldo, they signed an agreement to fix the 60 establishments managed by the SLEPs. This consisted of “the least of the least”: fixing the bathrooms, siphons, electricity, and the delivery of teaching materials; while an investigation was carried out by the Magisterium into the “lost” money from local services.
However, just five days after the entry of academics and assistants to the establishments, “no progress is seen.” And the region’s College of Teachers will define on February 28 whether to resume the extensive strike that it maintained in 2023.
“With Carlos Rodríguez (president of the Atacama College of Teachers) we went on December 13 to tell Minister Cataldo that the commitments were not being fulfilled, we warned him that nothing was being done. He told us, ‘well, when they go on vacation we are going to carry out the works.’ The teaching management teams with the assistants go to work on the 26th and the establishments only opened this week to start carrying out works,” Yariela Ardiles tells The counter.
In Santiago, the president of the College of Teachers, Mario Aguilar, sees Arriata as too optimistic about fulfilling the agreement and that the delays are evident.
“If the minister(s) is going to put urgency into the works, to put more people in Atacama, congratulations. But if you maintain today’s pace of work, you will never reach March 5 with the necessary repairs,” says Mario Aguilar.
Despite this, the reflection of the union authority is even deeper: more than that of the undersecretary, the problem is the design of the SLEP.
“Undersecretary Arratia inherited a very difficult situation, with very deplorable management in the SLEP of Atacama. But beyond the deplorable management, there is a structural problem with the SLEP, which has to do with the law, with the system that was conceived. And therefore, the problem will not have a solution and the same thing will begin to happen later with another SLEP,” evaluates Aguilar.
The contrasting views on Undersecretary Arratia
The landing of the psychologist Alejandra Arratia Martínez in the Undersecretariat of the Mineduc, on March 10, 2023, replacing the teacher Gabriel Bosque (PC) was well received in political and union circles. In these spaces, her 25 years of experience in the field of education stand out, including her time as executive director of the 2020 Foundation, and in international organizations such as UNESCO.
In political circles of public education, she was also valued as a former monitor of the Alborada Workshop, which provided training to convicts in the former Santiago Penitentiary and in a youth center at Hogar de Cristo.
In 2004 she was head of the Education Department of Sernac, when it was directed by the deputy and president of the DC, Alberto Undurraga. From there she came to Mineduc in 2005, recommended by Nicolás Eyzaguirre. In the portfolio, she became coordinator of the School Curriculum and Evaluation Unit (UCE), when the head of the Education portfolio was Mónica Jiménez, between 2009 and 2010, during the first government of Michelle Bachelet.
But in the ruling party they say that it was in Bachelet’s second term, when after returning from a postgraduate degree in Australia, where she put together a powerful network in the Frente Amplio, several of whose leaders were ideologues of the SLEP, among them then deputy Giorgio Jackson and the then Mineduc advisor – today head of the second floor of La Moneda – Miguel Crispi.
“With the management of Eyzaguirre and Delpiano, Arratia worked with Cataldo who was an advisor. Although she was not involved in the creation of the SLEP, she did put together a network of contacts with her main defenders in the Mineduc, with Crispi, Gonzalo Muñoz, Francisco Martínez, Luisa Jiménez, and several others,” says a source. of Education.
“The responsibility lies absolutely with Undersecretary Arratia”
In recent weeks, his management has been questioned both by members of the Congressional Education Commission and by the senators for Atacama.
“The Undersecretary of Education, Alejandra Arratia, in the Senate delivered reports that are generalities. There is no concrete progress on how the school situation will be faced in March. One of the fundamental issues is the educational reactivation plan (…) we have heard pure poetry from the undersecretary. (…) the problems focus on the management of the Undersecretariat,” said Senator Yasna Provoste (DC) a few days ago in From before.
Senator Provoste warned before the Education Commission of the Upper House a lack of urgency on the part of the Government in complying with the agreement protocol to approve the Education item of the 2024 Budget and also delays in the works of the SLEPs of Atacama. Provoste placed the blame squarely on Arratia for the failures.
“I am even more worried when Undersecretary Arratia herself has such lax times, trying to say that ‘we have until December of this year to fulfill this commitment’, when the issue is how we prepare the school year that begins in March and at this point, we do not We still have a clear plan regarding transportation,” Provoste reproached.
His counterpart for Atacama, RN senator Rafael Prohens, also questions Arratia’s role in the SLEP case.
“Although he has been in office for a short time (one year), my very biased evaluation, by the way, is that after the SLEP Atacama crisis, where teachers were paralyzed for 80 days, some changes were made which are not yet noticeable in the region, because we continue to be uncertain whether children and adolescents will be able to enter classes at the beginning of the school year. In all the written media we read that the establishments are not in conditions to receive students and teachers,” the RN senator told The counter.
And he added: “It is not possible for parents and students not to enjoy their family vacations due to the uncertainty of not knowing if they will send their children to school. That responsibility lies absolutely with Undersecretary Arratia, for that reason my evaluation is not the best. The ministry in general has left it to the directors of the SLEPs to assume responsibility for facing the problems, when the solutions are political and economic. Management is a problem for directors.”
