Matías, 11 years old, and Esteban, 13, missed their fourth and eighth grades of basic education, respectively, in 2020, amid the confinement measures due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Both attended the Abdón Calderón Muñoz Fiscal Educational Unit, located on the slopes of Cerro Santa Ana, in Guayaquil, but they could not follow the teaching through the pedagogical cards and they abandoned the online studies.
“My husband and I had to go back to our jobs, there was no one to control them on the internet. We don’t have a computer either. tablets. The connection is of poor quality and they entered from a cell phone, so they did not continue, ”says her mother, Patricia Merchán, 33, who lives in one of the houses on the regenerated part of Cerro Santa Ana.
With this they joined the 75,566 who dropped out of the educational system and the 30,037 who were not promoted to the higher instance in Ecuador in the 2020-2021 school year. Together they reach 105,603.
These are lower figures than those registered before the pandemic. A total of 90,665 stopped studying after enrolling and 83,372 were not promoted in the 2018-2019 school year. Both add up to 174,037.
Patricia will do the paperwork for her children to resume their studies in 2022 in person at public education, after losing two years of schooling. She doesn’t want them to replicate her story, since she only finished elementary school. “In the countryside, the only thing that makes us study is school. From there, I migrated from the San José site, in Palenque (in the province of Los Ríos), to Guayaquil to work in houses”, she notes, an activity that she maintains.
The COVID-19 pandemic also affected the 2019-2020 school year, when 90,854 students dropped out of schools and colleges or missed the year, an amount similarly lower than in 2018-2019.
Why less stayed the year during the pandemic?
In the case of public education, it is explained that there were fewer evaluation filters, since changes were established that implied, for example, the suspension of supplementary, remedial and grace exams.
“Everything was graded around projects that had to be done at home, so only those who didn’t submit them stayed for the year. Activities were sent to those who stayed extra and they practically passed; they had to be helped as much as possible, and that was what was done”, assures the teacher and tutor of the tenth year of basic education of a fiscal educational unit in the north of Guayaquil regarding what happened in the 2020-2021 school year.
Just this year they already have a schedule to take supplementary, remedial and grace exams for those who stay from the 2021-2022 school period, he adds.
Renata Castillo, coordinator of the education program at the Universidad San Francisco de Quito, affirms that one should not wait until the minor is about to stay for the year and only then take certain corrective measures: “If we follow a process of formative evaluation in which From the beginning we can detect difficulties that students have, since it responds to gaps that they have been carrying from previous years or, even, perhaps critical learning problems are seen that need a different intervention by the teacher, from the psychopedagogy department”.
If you don’t work on the basis or on the reasons why the student doesn’t perform well, he adds, it is possible that he will replicate the history of failure in the year he repeats: “Even later, they even withdraw from the system. Because they missed the year, parents may not see the importance of studying. This happens more in public education than in private, and they consider that they are more efficient outside of school, working”.
Castillo assures that it is due change the mentality that being successful necessarily implies passing a final exam: “Actually, we can see how through projects, portfolios or other ways of demonstrating their performance, the achievement of certain objectives with less traditional evaluations and that they see more the performance in general and not only how they respond to a test of answers multiple choice, true and false, where perhaps because of anxiety, nerves of some kids, they can answer in the wrong way”.
Another factor is the emotional part, says Castillo. “Some do not perform adequately because they may have problems at home, problems with self-efficacy, anxiety, depression, and that does not make them respond according to their potential. (You have to) look at all these aspects before making the decision to leave him for the year or not”.
There is also the difficulty of those who get by just right, Castillo notes, with learning gaps whose effect is observed in the last years of schooling: “What is going to happen is that in the last years of school, already in high school, They will be far behind the rest of their peers. Even these kids, when they graduate, go to college at a disadvantage and can replicate failure again.”
The responsibility for failure does not only fall on the teachers, says Castillo. “Teachers lack support from institutions, from the Ministry of Education itself and above all from families. The teacher has to justify everything he did and why he left the student for the year. It is a bit like putting all the responsibility on the teacher, when in reality the success or failure of the student depends on him/herself, on the family, on the educational institution; obviously, also from the teacher, but even from the whole system, how the curriculum is put together, the way of evaluating. In the end, it is the fault of an entire system. What ends up happening is that some professors better pass the year, because that way they avoid all this justification process that they have to do”.
Bryan Naranjo repeated the first year of high school and, after graduating and getting a place, left his higher education studies at the University of Guayaquil in 2021. He says he did not replicate the story of when he was younger, although he does acknowledge that staying the year meant an opportunity to learn from their mistakes and know the consequences of their actions.
“At the time I saw it as if the teachers were against me; well, one in particular; or as if he hadn’t had enough opportunities. But none of that is true. I had many opportunities, maybe more than there should have been, and the teachers always supported me”, he indicates.
One of the motivations for leaving higher education was to find a job, which she has not yet found. “Dropout creates a lot of uncertainty, but I will continue with my higher studies in due time, I will get my degree and we will see what happens with everything else,” he says.
Help at home is a support for the student to be successful
Mauricio Sánchez, Patricia’s husband, has a business selling food on step 100 of the Santa Ana hill stairway, but his income fell due to the lack of tourists in the midst of the pandemic, which continues after the murder of a Dutch citizen, last January, in the middle of an armed robbery.
“He got into debt with a motorcycle and now he delivers food like Uber. It doesn’t happen at home either. We leave our children with an aunt who helps me. I have a nine-month-old girl,” says Patricia, who returns home at 4:00 p.m.
Matías and Esteban even take care of their younger sister for a couple of hours each day, from Monday to Friday, daily periods in which the aunt has to leave until Patricia arrives.
After leaving their studies in 2020, they were not enrolled last year. “This year I do plan to enroll them,” adds Patricia.
Another impact of the pandemic is the increase in the number of minors of school age who are not enrolled in the national education system.
Only In the current academic period 2021-2022, it is estimated that 752,662 minors between the ages of 3 and 17 did not enroll last yearwhich is the difference between the number of students enrolled and the population projection of the National Institute of Statistics and Censuses (INEC) for those years.
The number of students enrolled in the entire education system went from 4,386,324 in 2018 to 4,346,820 in 2019 and 4,266,225 in 2020.
It is a downward trend that has been maintained since 2015 and that is more pronounced as a result of the pandemic, after almost total enrollment had been achieved, at least in primary education.
Matías and Esteban are in that group of non-enrolled students. ANDIn the current academic period 2021-2022, 4,256,495 registered, the lowest amount in the last seven years. They were 80,595 less compared to 2020-2021
Learning poverty affects 53% of children under ten years of age in Ecuador
The learning levels of young Ecuadorians are very low, indicates Max Núñez, director of Innovation and Competitiveness of the Municipality of Portoviejo.
The results of the last standardized evaluation carried out on students at three levels of the education system (seventh and tenth years of basic education and third year of high school) in four areas of knowledge, in the 2019-2020 academic period, indicate that 65% of they had ratings between “elementary” and “insufficient”.
“In math, 68% got ‘elementary’ and ‘insufficient’. That is already an alert of what was happening. What the pandemic does is deepen these gaps even more,” says Núñez.
The challenge is that learning does not necessarily have to be evaluated by the presentation of tasks or tests, but that the activities or lessons have a purpose: “It is not that you never have to do homework, what happens is that it is project-based learning. The big difference is that they are not tasks to be sent. There is something with purpose, a project to have a result at the end of the day. What they are learning is applied in some project and those tasks become a meaningful activity; they are not for completing a portfolio or filling out a folder of activities”.
There are a learning poverty rate that measures the gaps between children under ten years of age: “It is observed if they can read a short paragraph and if they can do a mathematical operation. In other words, it is not an evaluation that seeks to know how much knowledge a student has, but simply to know if a student is capable of reading a paragraph and understanding it and of solving a mathematical operation, before they are ten years old”.
In Ecuador, 53% of those tested failed this test before the pandemic. “In this there is a great challenge, now, with emotional problems, lack of contact with classmates, lack of time in interaction with the teacher so that he can accompany him, if he did not have an internet connection or was not enrolled due to lack of resources, etc. With all these aggravating factors of the situation, that percentage can go up a lot in a few more years. This will be reflected in an entire generation, in the quality of life of these people and, at the end of the day, in the level of income they will have.”
Five out of ten children under the age of ten have basic learning disabilities. (I)
Source: Eluniverso
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