A national network of teachers was created to fight for the quality of teaching: “Stop educational fraud”

Santa Fe started the initiative to create this National Board for Educational Quality (MenAce), which seeks to fill the current tremendous shortcomings in education policy. They were brought together by the love of teaching but also by the fear of the latest facilitative measures proposed by the Federal Council of Education, such as the automatic year pass from 2020 to 2021 - and in some jurisdictions beyond - the suspension of examination tables and numerical grades, the grouping of subjects by areas and the possibility of promoting with up to two unapproved areas, among other demagogic provisions that are but a corollary of a spirit that comes from afar, of a false conception of what inclusion is. .

The starting signal was given by Liana Pividori, professor of Language and Literature, deputy director of the Zuviría Institute, who has just been distinguished, along with other outstanding women from Santa Fe, by the Chamber of Deputies of that province, precisely because of her struggle for educational quality, from the two groups she coordinates: Argentina for education and the brand new MenAce.

The Bureau coordinated by Pividori will soon present a document summarizing everything that in the opinion of those who are at the forefront of the classroom feeling the crisis day by day believe should be corrected or changed.

They will not avoid any topic: from ESI, a new panacea according to the Ministry of Education, - “sex education must be provided but what is being proposed today is political ideology”, they say from MenAce - to possible amendments to the teaching statutes, through repetition - which they see as “a learning tool, not only of content, but also of maturity and assumption of responsibility” -, the relinkage - because “the number of children who have been left out of the system should alarm the authorities but there are no plans for them” - and even the high issue of the inclusion of children with disabilities in schools without appropriate instruments for them end.

Specifically, a plan for educational reform at all levels.

Meanwhile, in weekly meetings of the representatives of all the provinces - they only need to integrate San Juan, the Sarmientina province, the irony of destiny - there will be debates, mutual aid and even training; the first, a course on comprehensive literacy for the initial and primary levels that will be given Ana Borzone, the pedagogue who recently revolutionized the media and debate when she denounced in an interview with Infobae the global method as responsible for the terrible school results in reading and writing. This two-month course is fee-based but open to all teachers.

“They say that children leave school because they repeat,” says Pividori in a chat with Infobae. But they leave because they don't make sense of it, because they give away titles but they don't teach it.”

“It is essential and urgent to propose a systematic, concrete, viable and plausible educational policy to be implemented and measured beyond the current governments as a state policy,” says a material made available to teachers by MenAce entitled “Guidelines for thinking about the concept of quality in education” -; a a policy that prioritizes the effective learning of students, especially those with the greatest vulnerability, since the lack of learning is one of the factors that cause abandonment of the system”.

They add: “The inclusion policies implemented to date are not enough to retain students in the system, we need them to be in a school that teaches, that must be the focus for students to learn.”

“We must dismantle this educational fraud, which is false promotions, titles that are a scam and that generates illiterate and semi-literate people,” says Liana Pividori.

And he accuses: “It is a false inclusion that the one who harms the most is the one who claims to defend the most. Whoever has a good time, gets paid a private teacher. The rest send the boy to a school that offers him nothing. Out of paternalism, out of compassion, everything is facilitated to them, but they are not taught.”

Recently, a group of educators and other cultural personalities launched a warning cry for “educational emptying” and “unacceptable pressure teachers to certify unverified learning.” Among the signatories were some of the teachers who have now launched this National Table.

MenAce is defined as “an association of an educational, social, non-profit and non-profit nature”, whose purpose is “to work towards a quality Argentine education at its four levels: Initial, Primary, Secondary and Tertiary”; “to fight for the eradication of political indoctrination in the classroom” and “to disseminate and accompany in this commitment to the whole country”.

With regard to the definition of quality, MenAce argues that it is “the way in which a society projects its future” and also complies with the definition contained in article 29 of the International Convention on the Rights of the Child: “Education should be aimed at developing personality, skills and mental and physical capacity of the child to the fullest possible extent”.

The MenAce document reads: “All public policies (interrupted and criticized standardized evaluations, Fines plan, prohibition of repetition, narrowing of curricular axes, etc.) have generated, even if it was not the objective, an exodus from public to private schools, in order to preserve by the families the quality of education”.

In addition, they insist that in order to measure quality, results must be evaluated, something that is almost a bad word in recent years. “This (educational quality) is not achieved if all actors in the system are not willing to be evaluated, both managers and teachers, students and all staff who perform tasks in schools. Measure to improve. This is educational justice with quality,” they say.

Shortly after walking, MenAce is already becoming a 3rd grade organization, as other associations already constituted have joined such as #queremosaprender, Rural Missions, Teachers for Education and Organized Students. “We also work in collaboration with Organized Fathers from various locations, such as Pilar, Hurlingham, Tandil, Reconquista and Avellaneda,” explains Pividori who serves as coordinator of the Bureau, supported by Shirley Díaz and Vanesa Vicentín, secretaries, Esteban Marinone, moderator, and Patricio Tourne Passarino, representative of Organized Students, and María José Orazzi, responsible for dissemination (IG and Fbk respectively).

The immediate project is to bring the Bureau to all the provinces to hold meetings with teachers in each place.

In short, putting education on the shoulder, covering the shortcomings of official policy, questioning the authorities and raising the awareness of all Argentines about what Guillermo Jaim Etcheverry rightly defined as “educational tragedy”.

[To contact, you can use Facebook, MenAce, Instagram menace.argentina and the email menace.argentina@gmail.com ]

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