WHY EDUCATION IN COLOMBIA
Despite more recent progress towards national stability, equal access to quality education in Colombia, for many, remains a struggle. According to a recent study by the International Displacement Monitoring Center, universal education up to at least the 9th grade is mandated by the Colombian constitution, however in 2005 22% percent of children between the ages of 5 and 6, 8% between 7 and 11, and 15% percent between 12 and 15 were not attending school. This amounted to approximately 1.2 million children, the vast majority from low-income families living in under-served communities.
The main barrier to access is financial. The law aside, families are still expected to pay monthly fees for transportation, supplies, uniforms and tuition. For the population living in poverty (estimated by the World Bank to be 37.2%) these costs are too much to bear and have made education unaffordable. Colombia, in fact, is the only country in Latin America where primary education is not free.
Additionally, there are still serious internal social, political and institutional barriers in Colombia that prevent universal access to education for under-served children, including an insufficient supply of schools; lack of municipal resources to provide educational services; and internal displacement and child labor due to the ongoing armed conflict.
There is also a huge disparity in quality and access between urban and rural areas. Poverty rates are much higher in rural areas, where the effects of the conflict are more immediate and pose a greater threat. This also leads to significant cultural barriers, whereby children are at risk of either being conscripted to fight or pushed into labor, often for the sake of helping out their families financially.
In terms of educational assessment, only students—not teachers or schools—are evaluated. Biannual standardized tests are administered to measure academic achievement in the 5th and 9th grades, but no standardized tests or matrixes are mandated to measure effectiveness of teachers or administrators, and their methods.
The ongoing armed conflict in Colombia, and the resulting violence and internal displacement, continues to have a detrimental effect on many rural children and their participation in formal education. According to the United Nations Refugee Agency’s (UNHCR) 2011 Country Profile Report, 3.4 million citizens in Colombia were accounted as Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) in mid-2010. That number is expected to increase to 3.6 million by the end of 2011—the second largest population of IDPs in the world, after Sudan—and more than half are school-age children. Add to this related instances of kidnapping, rape, forced conscription of child soldiers, attacks on schools, landmine injuries, and other forms of loss and trauma associated with the conflict, and it is clear that the future of an entire generation in Colombia could be needlessly lost.
Some educational statistics for elementary education
