Education: standards that were never met and an absent President

What are the similarities between National Education Law 26.206, Provincial Education Law 13688, Law 26.075 on Educational Financing, Higher Education Law 24.521, updated in 2006, Law 14.637 on the Absence Regime for Pregnant Students, Law 26.150 for the National Comprehensive Education Program, Technical Education Law 26.058, Law 25.864, which guarantees 180 days of classes, and other regulations aimed at the sector? The answer is simple: none of them are enforced.

All of them, compiled in a single paragraph, seem like a collection of administrative and bureaucratic provisions that few people are likely familiar with in depth. What's the point of the comparison? To realize that the problem of Argentine education is serious and that its solutions aren't tied to rules and administrative provisions that prove ineffective, because when they aren't applied and aren't penalized for not doing so, they end up as cold ink on paper. In fact, if we were to compare all the educational laws for basic and tertiary education in each province, we would arrive at the same result: they do not meet their objectives; in fact, many overlap and modify objectives.

For example, Law 25,864, passed two decades ago, which guaranteed 180 days of school for all students in the country, has never been enforced since its approval. To top it all off, almost 90% of Argentine primary schools offer single-day classes. Compared to other countries in the region, our country offers few hours of classes per year because, except in Buenos Aires, there are almost no full-day schools in the rest of the districts. Complying with the law, in the best-case scenario, between 720 and 750 hours of classes would be taught annually in primary schools, compared to the 1,800 taught in Chile. This was supposedly resolved by the Education Financing Law, which proposed that 30% of schools should be full-day by 2010, but this goal has not been met either, not even half of that goal by 2025, nor has the comprehensive funding mandated by the law. And, what makes matters worse, today, instead of implementing it, the solution the libertarian government found was to suspend it; it didn't even attempt to implement it halfway, erasing its responsibility in the matter with a stroke of the pen. Of course, all this results in worsening the alarming results we have today: children who finish the first cycle of primary school without knowing how to read, or students who finish secondary school with no reading comprehension, all demonstrated by the decline in the results of national and international learning assessment tests.

All the aforementioned regulations have noble objectives and content that any parent would aspire to in designing a school, and therefore, their children's education. But we remain limited to the statements, to the point where we cannot even guarantee a minimum number of school hours for all children in the country or mandatory secondary education, which we are far from achieving. As a response to the education problem, the ruling party no longer has a National Teacher Incentive Fund, nor a National Salary Guarantee Fund, and the "national" source of educational funding is gradually disappearing. We see this when reviewing the items that evaporated 100% in last year's budget execution, such as improving educational quality; Conectar Igualdad (Connect Equality), territorial strengthening, and all types of transfers to the provinces. And, in a country where schooling is mandatory for children starting at age 4, there was a 70% drop in Early Childhood Education. Other items fell between 30 and 75%, all of them important. This year the scenario is repeating itself.

At universities, there is indeed a need for a debate about how to regulate an educational service that once served as a model, because the public university is in a serious crisis, and this reality must be addressed. But it seems they are viewed as the "enemy of the people," because the libertarian solution is simply to defund them. And this has been the case from the beginning. The failed 2025 Budget Project, which was never approved, contemplated allocating a third of what the National Interuniversity Council requested to cover salaries and financing expenses. This leaves universities in constant conflict with the government. There is no shared responsibility with the provinces here because the university system is the sole responsibility of the national government, but the solution seems to have been to ignore the problem. The law says so, although, as we can see, that matters little.

All of this is on the table. The problem exists; it's tangible. We are experiencing a true educational tragedy, with a government that either isn't interested in the issue—much more so than others that didn't do it well either—or proposes absolutely unviable proposals, such as funding education with vouchers, while also pointing out that on the other side of the table are the teachers' unions that manage education systems as if they were political trenches and act according to the party of the government they oppose. A problem without a solution that, to top it all off, President Milei doesn't seem to care about. Let's see, he never talks about education; last year he reluctantly incorporated a commitment to education into the failed "May Pact," which didn't dictate a single follow-up action. His government only issues vouchers—actually, subsidies—to families to help them pay for their children's tuition at less expensive private schools. These schools become the only for-profit private activity beyond their educational function. The state subsidizes supply—with subsidies from districts to schools—and now also demand, with this aid to families. But education policy has primarily become a statement of good intentions declared in laws that garnered the necessary consensus to become state policies, but which are never fully implemented.

The most recent example was last year, when the ruling party and its allies declared education an "essential service." Two months later, they presented a budget that practically defunded it and shifted all responsibility to the provinces (what? Wasn't it essential?). Or was it just a law restricting teachers' constitutional right to protest? Another law destined to fail, because to defend the essentiality of a service, the national and provincial governments must first fulfill their responsibilities—in this case, prioritizing investment by keeping their promises made when signing the May Pact.

We've experienced more than three decades of decline in educational quality, and at best, alarming stagnation. Just look at how, slowly and gradually, neighboring countries have managed to climb out of the most backward places and improve their education. Recent history shows only failures, and the current government is floundering on this issue. What's worse, it does so by demonstrating its scant interest in education, with the disregard and underfunding it grants to public universities, science and technology, and research. And with the decision to ignore, even against the current educational regulations, decisions and funding for education from the national government. But just look at his actions: since taking office, the President has only been seen at one school, a private one, the same one where his sister Karina and I attended school, and he hasn't visited a public school. Also listen to his words: "Public education has done a lot of harm by brainwashing people."

With this manifest disinterest from the ruling power, if unenforceable regulations continue to pile up, only piling up paper in the archives, if concrete objectives are not pursued, and if education continues to be the preferred sector to be cut down, the result is clear, and no law or advance assessment is needed to determine the outcome: in a few years, we'll be worse off. So bad that we'll struggle to recognize ourselves in our own history.

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