The government proposes that students do not repeat this year either and another controversy opens

After the controversy over the postponement of the Aprender tests, a new heated debate seems to be winning over the educational world. Now, because the Ministry of Education analyzes creating a “pedagogical unit” which includes the school years 2020, 2021 and 2022. This means that, as happened last year, all students would spend a year or a year without accrediting their knowledge. This learning assessment (now three years) would be considered only at the end of 2022.

The initiative was proposed this Tuesday by the national Ministry of Education to the provincial ministers for their analysis at a meeting of the Federal Council of Education. And already at this meeting, some ministers – like those of Ciudad, Córdoba and Mendoza- they expressed their objections.

Marisa Díaz, Secretary of Education of the National Ministry of Education – who presented the proposal – recounts Bugle What is the idea. “Now we are going through the last period of the pedagogical unit 2020/2021 and we allow ourselves with the Federal Council to assess how this time has passed, what are the consequences and about this discussion we will see what decision we will take by 2022“, He said.

And he explained the reasons for the idea in dance. “You have to understand that working in educational cycles is a tradition of the Argentinian education system. We have raised the agenda of topics with the intention of seeing how we move forward. The next school is different and you have to start making decisions“, He said.

The objective of the educational unit is to warn children who cannot learn because of the difficulties of the pandemic stay on the road. For this they must be accompanied especially under the figure of “Supported promotion”.

The debate arises because the decision must be taken at the federal level and the education situation today is diverse in the jurisdictions. While some cannot still guarantee high levels of attendance today (and it is therefore justified to move towards an educational unit that includes 2022); in other districts, the school year was somewhat “normalized”. And then it could be evaluated in the traditional way.

This is the case in the city of Buenos Aires, where classes began on February 17 and since then have only been interrupted for three days, due to strict confinement. From the City they say they have already established by resolution all the guidelines for the school year.

The Minister of Buenos Aires, Soledad Acuña, came to raise it publicly. He said that the educational unit until 2022 would mean “say that everyone comes home, that no one repeats, that it doesn’t matter whether they learned or not“He said to the TN signal.

“You can measure that exception a year we had an exception, but a year and a half later we can’t talk about the same. And that means we’re gonna cheat on the boys tell them they can do something they haven’t learned“He added.

Bugle He also met with the Minister of Education of Mendoza José Thomas. “I strongly believe in following the individual trajectories of boys, and it is well proven that repetition is unnecessary. But you have to see what devices are used to counter it. We have a nominal system, which supports each of the boys trying not to stay, ”he said.

“The conditions are not the same as last year, and therefore we shouldn’t do the same of the operational. But yes from a conceptual point of view: repetition as we knew is not the solution for this year either, ”he added.

For Guillermina Tiramonti, FLACSO researcher, the educational unit “can mean two things. One, that we are going to rearm the program for these 3 years to define the knowledge that boys must acquire given the pandemic situation, and do the evaluations of the case. This that would be very smart. Or do we not assess anything until 2022, and that would be terrifying: that would mean that we are ready to teach the children nothing. And it is only at the 22nd that we will deal with whether the boys know or not, with the aggravating factor that perhaps the 22nd we can invent something to launch the evaluations until the 23rd and then the period. government ends and we’ll see what we do, ”he said.

Gustavo Zorzoli, former rector of Buenos Aires is very critical. “This proposal arises like other times in the orbit of the state bureaucracy, which ignores the problems faced by the education system and only discourages the study of our students and continues to level itself down by not evaluating, ”he said Bugle.

The country, with school results that have been worrying since before the arrival of the pandemic

There are still no results displayed how the pandemic impacted learning Argentinian students. From March 2020 until now no assessment has been made and the next one will not take place until April 2022, due to the postponement of Aprender testing. So the last thermometer which measures boys’ academic performance dates from 2019 (last Learn tests taken) and 2018 (PISA international tests).

And in both the results were worrying. Aprender’s latest test measured how well high school students know math and language.

In mathematics, there are the main ones. The level of Argentinian students was not good, but in 2019, it’s even worse. Only 28.6% reach a satisfactory level. Seen from another angle: 71.4% of high school students have left for university or the world of work, barely managing to recognize some basic notions of the discipline and solve very simple calculations.

And another disturbing fact: 42.8% were “below base”. That is, 4 in 10 of these young people did not understand the most basic and basic questions of mathematics.

At PISA tests, which is drawn from 15-year-old students from different countries, Argentina has not improved since 2006. The last edition showed that more than half of these students do not understand the basics of a text and seven in ten still cannot solve a simple calculation.

Argentina remained in 63rd out of 77 countries assessed. And it continued to drop in Latin America, where it was only over Panama and Dominican Republic, and almost “on par” with Peru, which years ago had a much lower performance. With the 2018 results, the country moved further and further away from Chile, which remains at the regional top, and other countries which are improving slowly but steadily, such as Uruguay, Costa Rica and Mexico. .

In 2018, the study focused on written comprehension. Therefore, it appeared that 52% of Argentinian 15-year-old students could not “identify the main idea in a text of moderate length, find information based on explicit criteria, or reflect on the purpose and form of the texts. “. And 25.7% barely reached this basic understanding. Only 1% obtained the best results in reading. with Ricardo Braginski