Caracas, Oct 18 (EFE).- Public education in Venezuela is in “emergency” due, among other reasons, to the shortage of teachersAccording to the union, a situation that the Government is trying to resolve with several programs, among which stands out a call for retirees to rejoin and several offers that seek to convince teachers who left the classrooms due to low salaries.
According to estimates from the Andrés Bello Catholic University (UCAB), also released by the Venezuelan Federation of Teachers (FVM), About 250,000 teachers are needed to cover initial, primary and secondary education classrooms who were left without instructors in the last decade, when the country went through a deep economic crisis.
For this reason, the Venezuelan president, Nicolás Maduro, promises aid to teachers and asks them, “for the love of the 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 the cost of transportation.
“Burlesque” offer
For the Secretary General of the FVM, Leila Escobar, The Executive’s promises are a “burlesque” offerespecially the one referring to credits for teachers, since -remember- The salary of this group is less than 30 dollars per monthbeyond the fact that they receive another $130 in bonuses.
Then, he explained, any credit will completely consume his income at the time of making the first payment, so this offer – he believes – will not convince the teachers who are today “fixing hair, painting nails, making cakes” to return to the classrooms. “, making arepas, cleaning houses, taking care of the elderly” or in any task that generates better remuneration than teaching.
It highlights that the protagonists of the “educational fact” are the teachers and the students, so Programs must be focused on meeting the needs of bothas well as schools, whose national total presents failures or deterioration of infrastructure and lack of work materials.
Although on September 30, regarding the start of the school year, the Government reported repairs in 8,000 educational institutions, the FVM emphasizes that there are more than 20,000 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 is profitable enough for them to return to the classrooms.
Emergency measures”
The resolutions announced by the Ministry of Education – a portfolio that is being restructured – are emergency measures, typical of the situation in the sector, or that is how Carlos Calatrava, director of the UCAB School of Education, sees it.
The teacher remembers that The State must guarantee mandatory levels of training for millions of children and adolescentsa task that is accomplished in pieces, since students are going from one school year to another without receiving classes on specific subjects, something that 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.
On the other hand, he clarifies, 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, according to the records of the UCAB and the FVM.
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, suggests that, at best, Venezuela gained 4,000 new teachers last year, a pace that would take 60 years to fill the existing vacancies.
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