The coronavirus crisis forces 2.5 million Mexican students to drop out

A primary school in the State of Oaxaca.Enrique Ordoñez / Enrique Ordoñez

The tragedy caused by the coronavirus crisis in Mexico has spread to schools. The Ministry of Public Education (SEP) reported this weekend that at least 2.5 million students left classrooms this year, after the school year was suspended due to the health contingency, which has left more than 52,000 deaths and 475,902 infections from the coronavirus. This is a strong blow to education in a country that was already lagging behind. The Government tries to stop the bleeding of students with a strategy whose axis is the alliance with several private television channels to broadcast classes from August 24, an initiative that has been criticized by teachers, who consider it limited and fear that deepen the educational backwardness that already affects the poorest areas of the country.

Education has reported that this year "the definitive abandonment" of schools affected 10% of the 25 million students who entered the school year that began in August last year. In March, authorities locked schools and sent students home. All the effort was focused on a distance education strategy through the Internet that did not give the expected results, in a country with large areas where Internet access is very limited when there is none. Figures from INEGI, the national statistics institute, show that more than 16 million households are offline, indicating the digital divide that prevents millions of students from accessing educational content online.

"We will make an enormous effort so that this abandonment can be abated," said Luciano Concheiro Bórquez, Undersecretary of Higher Education, Saturday afternoon at a press conference at the Presidential Palace in Mexico City. The official has affirmed that the bet of the Government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador continues to be the field of education with new technologies and the use of the media, both public and private. “The transition to a digital culture allows us to build a new type of communication. Human contact is irreplaceable, but today we can guarantee other special support ”, he explained.

Education authorities admitted Monday that the country does not have the conditions for students to return to schools amid the pandemic. For this reason, they signed an agreement with the country's large television stations (Televisa, Azteca, Grupo Multimedios and Grupo Imagen) to broadcast the content that will be prepared by the SEP with the support of public television. A report by the National Council for the Evaluation of Social Development Policy (Coneval) published in 2018 shows that of the more than 226,000 public schools in the country, 2.2% have no water supply from any source (public network, wells , supply by tanker trucks) and only 53% are supplied through the public network. Furthermore, only 66.4% of the schools have sanitation services and 66.1% electricity. Regarding Internet access, this only reaches 22.7% of schools, a total of 51,387.

The report of school dropouts in Mexico comes days after UNESCO warned that 24 million students of all levels in the world could drop out of school due to the closings of school cycles caused by the pandemic, for which they asked The governments that reinforce the continuity of classes mainly among the most vulnerable population. The Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) warned in the study Education in times of coronavirus that "the prolonged closure of educational centers will have negative repercussions on the learning achieved, schooling on time, dropouts and promotion." Furthermore, "a prolonged crisis would cause a decrease in student enrollment in the public sector, especially in certain population groups as well as in private education in urban centers."