Strikes

Well, nothing like a little bit of déjà vu to make Colombia start to feel like home; today, the teachers at schools around the city went on strike to protest benefits and salary cuts. It didn’t affect the school I was teaching at, but some of the other schools with volunteers were affected.  Recall Scott Walker! Oh wait.

Meanwhile, there’s another, national movement going on because of higher education reforms, which meant that university students were also striking throughout the city.

As far as the university strikes, this has to do with a law the government is trying to pass that would privatize some of the public universities. Right now, the public universities—there’s one in each of the big cities—are close to free for the students who get in. They’re the best schools in the country; private schools are as good as your money can pay for, but none are as good as the public ones. However, it’s incredibly hard to get to a public university—you have to get a super high score on the IGFAS, they’re version of the SAT/ACT.

The government wants to double the amount of people who can get in, but also cut funding and try and make some of the funding private. The law is due to be put to vote very shortly. These protests started a few weeks ago in Bogota, and schools were vandalized and police were out in force.

In Barranquilla there isn’t violence but there was an organized march through some of the major parts of town. We’ll have to see how it continues.

In terms of the teacher strikes, there’s an interesting history to that as well. There’s a big teachers union in Colombia that has some fairly typical sorts of union scandals. About twenty years ago, the government didn’t want to hire new teachers who were eligible for the union so to save money they hired “temporary” teachers. Twenty years later, these temporary teachers are still teaching. Except, six years ago the government instituted reforms to try and give spots back to “qualified” teachers. The problem is of course that the temp teachers are very angry when they’re spots are taken since they’ve had the job for decades. And to compound matters, the way the new teachers are hired are by taking a test, and people with absolutely no teaching experience can get a teaching spot if they score high enough on the test.

And of course there are rumors of scandals, etc, and the union tried to prevent all the current teachers from taking the test but who knows. Right now there’s just sort of a mess going on with unhappy teachers, unqualified teachers, and the typical union woes.

All in all, we should probably just recall Scott Walker.