The statements by the current Minister of Education, after taking office in 2024, about the “urgency” of resolving various problems in the sector, if we exclude the recovery of teaching service time, are already a vague memory, although they were resumed when he remained in the portfolio in 2025.
From the revision of the Teaching Career Statute to the reformulation of “essential learning” and disciplinary programs, including the school management model and the statute of directors, not forgetting – whether you agree or not – the redefinition of schooling cycles or the simplification of administrative procedures in schools and between schools and the guardianship, everything was presented as requiring immediate intervention. As well as the problem of the lack of teachers, inherited from previous governments, also considered emerging, along with the need for rigorous accounting of students without classes.
As time passed, two curious phenomena occurred: on the one hand, the successive postponement of everything that had presented itself as an emergency, while measures emerged in areas that had not been announced as priorities, perhaps to give the appearance of action. If we exclude the package of measures for media consumption regarding the lack of teachers, of which only the allocation of overtime had some effects, everything will be postponed to the 2027-28 academic year.
The main exception was a somewhat abstruse “reform” of the organic structure of the MECI that is alleged to be in the direction of “modernization” or “innovation”, but whose initial results seem to translate into an unnecessary, uncreative disruption of the communication circuits between schools and the central services of the Ministry of Education.
As for what was previously urgent, if it is true that there are matters that require careful preparation, so as not to adopt hasty solutions that are inconsistent with reality, it is no less true that these postponements – with negotiations carried out at a shaky snail’s pace – convey a feeling of technical unpreparedness and a lack of political courage to take on options that are known to be subject to controversy.
Instead of establishing a timetable for the gradual introduction of structural changes in the educational system, it seems to have been decided to bring them all together in a short space of time, launching them on schools together, which can hardly be considered a good idea, unless it is part of some strategy linked to political cycles and the desire to present “results” in the electoral calendar.
Which means that the 2027-28 academic year seems to appear on the horizon as a kind of “magical year”, in which everything will happen, and it remains to be seen whether it will be a wonderful year or horrible. Given what is observed in other areas of governance, the scales clearly tip to one side.
Basic Education Teacher.
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