Marches of Fecode, the CUT, the CGT against the labor reform.
Photo: John Jairo Ortiz Herrera – Cristian Garavito
The main teachers’ union in Colombia is raising the tone of its rejection of the statutory education bill that is about to become law, with only one debate pending in the Senate plenary. The project was unblocked after the Government and the opposition reached an agreement on June 5, introducing several amendments to the original text, changes that Fecode now rejects and for which it is calling for a one-day national strike next Wednesday the 12th. of June.
We explained some of these amendments a few days ago in this newspaper and have to do with the role of tertiary education (which for Fecode is created “without sufficient support or debate with the academic community”), the financing of higher education ( that would no longer go only for public institutions), and university autonomy. “The amendment presented was not consulted with the Federation, on the contrary, several prepositions that we promptly established in the development of the debates were ignored, with the purpose of being discussed and incorporated,” the union says in a statement. public.
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Fecode criticizes that the project incorporates “a mixed approach to education, opening it to the logic of the market, clearly enabling its privatization and commercialization, under the pretext of improving quality and the fallacy of participation.” He adds that the project, as written today, “hits the aims and objectives of education,” reaffirming, he says, the competency-based approach and “denying the possibility of opening the discussion of a necessary curricular reform.”
Furthermore, say the teachers, the text that will reach the fourth debate, “restricts access to higher education for the broad populations with the most difficulties, by imposing meritocracy as a criterion.” Finally, for this sector of the teaching profession, the law would include a mandate from multilateral organizations to “subordinate teaching evaluation to results that do not depend exclusively on pedagogical practice.”
Regarding the latter, Fecode adds that said performance depends not only on pedagogical practice, “but on multiple factors associated with the education that the State is responsible for guaranteeing.” The union asks the government not to allow the approval of this law (despite the fact that it was the Ministry of Education itself that negotiated and approved these amendments) and to proceed to “generate a broad mobilization around a new participatory social dialogue, which consolidates and guarantee education as a fundamental right.”
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The union plans to have a national meeting on June 12 to continue consolidating its position.
