President Abinader called for a Pact for the Quality of Education that would be led by the Economic and Social Council (CES), and in which all the nation’s living forces would be involved.
The call, made at the start of the 2024-2025 school year, was immediately supported by more than thirty national and foreign organizations.
Both the President’s call and the broad support it garnered are surprising, because the issue was not a priority on the national agenda, given that the “National Pact for Educational Reform” was signed in 2014 and is in force until 2030.
The call for the reforms is as surprising as the fact that it was entrusted to the CES, an organization that is involved in the implementation of the 2014 pact and that, coincidentally, last February delivered its balance sheet of the dialogue on the reforms, among which the improvement of the quality of education stands out.
In this assessment, the CES reports on a Plenary Assembly, which has met on four occasions and which held a workshop in October in which “important decisions were made regarding the monitoring mechanisms of the Educational Pact, as well as the strengthening of the Monitoring and Evaluation Committee.”
Perhaps there is something we do not understand and it is not about a new pact, which should be clarified first to the CES, which in its balance sheet claims to pay particular attention to the prospects of basic education and even technical-professional education, “and the renewal of the members of the Social Oversight Committee, among other important measures” (pages 95, 96 and 97 of the Balance Sheet of Dialogue for the reforms, compendium of thematic tables, CES, February 2024).
To make matters worse, the ADP, one of the main violators of the 2014 pact, is asking that on this occasion, “the teaching class be given the opportunity to lead the new Pact for the Quality of Education,” supposedly from the perspective of school practice, because it claims that teachers are the ones who best know the needs of the system.
We are confused about the need for a new pact, unless we are going back to the times of Balaguer, who when he needed a problem not to be resolved, he appointed a commission, which also did not resolve anything, so now it seems that, to complicate things, one pact kills another pact.
