I’ve talked to people who work in the stock market and they don’t get nearly as excited when talking about stock prices going up or down, new regulations and global economic issues affecting sales. In contrast, people who work in education can discuss trends, regulations and issues with infectious passion even in the grocery store queue. Every ministerial announcement triggers at least one WhatsApp message asking “did you see this?”, along with a link followed by three exclamation points (!!!, just closing).

Generally, education professionals spell, and that is appreciated, so I left the lack of opening exclamation points to them. I ask: “and what happened now?” It’s old news, but I just found out. One of the latest agreements of the Ministry of Education MINEDUC-MINEDUC-2023-00012-A dated April 4, 2023 establishes a new rule on repeating the school year.

This is how students will be evaluated in the new trimester model that begins on the Coast and the Galapagos

Since you are busy people, I will explain. Until the third year of primary education, the school can recommend to the mother, father or legal representative that the student repeat the class if he has not achieved basic knowledge in certain areas. If the representatives do not agree, the student passes the year. From the fourth year onwards, children must repeat a year if they have not reached the minimum required levels, but only if they have never repeated a year before. In addition, the Ministry of Education continues with a “pedagogical recovery” scheme, now called Pedagogical Leveling and Acceleration, to compensate for the lack of learning in the classroom.

Pedagogical recovery has not been evaluated so far in Ecuador, and it should be done with the utmost seriousness. Is it a real learning mechanism? As education expert Andrea Castelnuovo says, holding a student accountable for failing to achieve expected levels absolves the teacher of responsibility. If you are with a child in the classroom, and the child is not learning, what is the teacher doing in the classroom? Quoting Castelnuovo, “it’s like a carpenter saying he doesn’t know how to use a saw and no one would be afraid.”

From rote learning to real-life problem solving: A new school curriculum approach

These reforms have important implications for our country. First, this ministerial agreement presupposes premature failure. The goal is not for teachers to start the school year with a mission to help their students achieve their goals, but to find a solution to the expected defeat. Second, it assumes that teachers will be able to solve deficiencies exclusively in time and space that do not belong to regular classes.

There is little evidence that the Ministry of Education is considering the possible consequences of this new scheme. If a child repeats a school year at such a young age, the family may state that they consider it a waste of time and money to continue sending them to school. If before they barely finished primary school, with a little luck, today there will be a large number of children who will leave formal education even earlier. All you need to do is go to the scary scream sticker on WhatsApp. (OR)