- Both the FVM and the UCAB agree that the reinstatement of retired teachers would help solve the situation, but under better salary conditions | Photo: The Diary
Public education in Venezuela is going through a critical moment, due, among other reasons, to the shortage of teachers, according to the union. This is a situation that the government of Nicolás Maduro is trying to resolve with several programs, among which stands out a call for retired teachers to rejoin and several offers that seek to convince teachers who left the classrooms due to low salaries to return.
According to estimates from the Andrés Bello Catholic University (UCAB), also released by the Venezuelan Federation of Teachers (FVM), about 250 thousand teachers are needed to cover the initial, primary and secondary education classrooms that were left without instructors in the last decade, when the country entered an economic crisis.
Faced with this scenario, Nicolás Maduro promises aid to teachers and asks them, “for the love of their vocation,” to return to teaching the millions of children and adolescents who have been receiving an incomplete education for years, also affected by the lack of water. food and electricity in schools and for the cost of transportation.
For the general secretary of the FVM, Leila Escobar, the Executive’s promises are a “burlesque” offer, especially the one referring to credits for teachers, since – remember – the salary of this union is less than 30 dollars a month, beyond them receiving another $130 in bonuses.
He explained that any credit will completely consume his income at the time of making the first payment, so this offer, he considered, will not convince the teachers who are today “fixing hair, painting nails, making cakes, making cakes, arepas, cleaning houses, taking care of old people” or in any task that generates better remuneration than teaching.
Programs that serve both teachers and students are urgently needed
He stressed that the protagonists of the “educational fact” are the teachers and the students, so the programs must be focused on meeting the needs of both, as well as the schools, whose national total presents failures or deterioration of the infrastructure and lack of work materials.
Although on September 30, at the beginning of the school year, the government reported the repair of 8,000 educational institutions, the FVM emphasizes that there are more than 20 thousand that were not attended to by the authorities and that present “the same deficiencies or worse.” .
“If we see all these multifactors that are not taken care of, we cannot talk about educational quality,” he remarked.
Regarding the call to retirees, Escobar estimates that there are about 200,000 teachers in this condition, an amount that would serve to meet the current demand “if there were a real salary policy” that would be profitable enough for them to return to the classrooms. .
Emergency measures”
Carlos Calatrava, director of the UCAB School of Education, considered that the resolutions announced by the Ministry of Education are emergency measures, specific to the situation in the sector.
The professor insisted that the State must guarantee mandatory levels of training for millions of children and adolescents, a task that “is accomplished in pieces,” since students are going from one school year to another without receiving classes on specific subjects, something This is especially noticeable in high school, where there is a shortage of teachers of exact and social sciences.
Regarding the government’s decision to return all public sector teachers who were performing other tasks to the classrooms, Calatrava believes that it is a correct action, taking into account the panorama, but insists that “it should not be the only measure nor should it be the star measure.”
“(It is necessary) that once again the schools of education (in which universities train future teachers) are crowded with people and not deserted as they have been in the last five years,” said the UCAB representative.
At UCAB alone, about 40 young people graduated as new teachers in 2023. This number, which according to Calatrava represents 1% of the national total. It suggests that, in the best-case scenario, Venezuela gained 4,000 new teachers in 2023, a rate that would take 60 years to fill existing vacancies.
With information from EFE
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