Colombian Juanita Castillo fondly recalls her more than 10 years at the private school Sans Façon in northern Bogotá. “I was very happy there. The teachers and the infrastructure were wonderful. It was well-known. We travelled to Canada and England to learn English,” Castillo tells BBC Mundo.
The memories of this former student have been fresh in their minds since it became known that this prestigious center in Bogotá announced its closure due to a lack of students and financial problems.
“When I graduated in 2015, the decline was already noticeable. Professors were leaving. The number of students was decreasing. The school even went from a female-only system to a mixed system, but the flame was not revived,” says Castillo.
The closure of Sans Façon has shocked the Colombian capital in recent days, but it is not surprising.
According to data from the Single Directory of Educational Establishments, 769 private schools closed in Colombia in the last year and a half.
“In Bogotá alone, 160 have closed and 60 more will close,” Julián de Zubiría, former advisor to the Ministry of Education in Colombia, founder of the educational institution Instituto Alberto Merani and renowned columnist, tells BBC Mundo.
“It is a delicate matter. These are not just small, neighbourhood schools that are closing. These are large institutions, with history and tradition, in cities with weight,” adds de Zubiría.
The accelerated closure of private schools has revived the debate on the transformation that appears to be taking place in the Colombian education system, marked by large gaps and the weight of the private sector in large departmental capitals (such as Barranquilla, Cali and Medellín) compared to the rest of the country, where there is a greater proportion of the public sector.
“There is much more beyond the public-private sphere. There are also private schools of very low quality and, at a national level, many public schools are also closing,” Laura Quiroz López, an expert in public policies for reducing poverty and inequality, told BBC Mundo.
So what is going on? Why are so many private schools closing? And what does this say about education in Colombia?
Accelerated demographic transition
To explain the accelerated closure of private schools, experts consulted by BBC Mundo refer to simple mathematics: there are fewer schools because there are fewer students.
And there are fewer students because fewer and fewer children are being born in Colombia.
It affects both the private and public sectors, although the burden of this demographic change in large capitals seems to weigh down private schools more because it is in the upper-middle classes where the drop in birth rates is most accentuated, according to de Zubiría.
“In the 1960s, Colombia had a birth rate similar to that of some countries in Africa, with more than six children per mother. Today, the rate is 1.3 children per mother in cities like Bogotá,” agree de Zubiría and Edna Bonilla, former Secretary of Education for the Mayor of Bogotá.
Not something unique. Figures from the World Bank show a collapse in the birth rate across the planet.
“But in Colombia it has been very fast. In Europe, for example, it was more gradual. But in the last 15 years the change here has been very abrupt,” says de Zubiría.
In other words, the Colombian population pyramid is rapidly inverting. It is a national challenge not only in education, but also in the economy, taxes, jobs and pensions.
That is if the dynamic is not reversed, although various projections indicate that the low global birth rate will continue to worsen.
The effect of the pandemic
The trend accelerated further when the coronavirus pandemic hit in 2020.
De Zubiría says that in Bogotá and other department capitals, public education has been considered to be of low quality.
But Bonilla, the former education secretary in Bogotá, says that education has improved in recent years, with enrollment increasing.
“When many parents moved their children from the private to the public sector for the lower cost, they left them there and did not return them,” explains Bonilla.
“This improvement in public education and the loss of purchasing power of many Colombians had something to do with it,” he added.
However, de Zubiría warns that many parents would be opting for virtual and home-based education for their children.
“That is my hypothesis. I do not see in the statistics that the public sector accepts in the same proportion the students who leave the private sector,” he explains.
“It is seen a lot in early childhood and primary education and it affects middle and lower strata, not just upper strata. There is private education in all ranges: very bad, poor, average, acceptable, good, excellent and extraordinary, with their price differences,” he adds.
According to experts, the pandemic has accelerated another reality: traditional private schools have lost relevance and have closed down due to their failure to modernize their methods and adapt to the new times.
“This happened a lot to private religious schools, like Sans Façon,” says de Zubiría.
What is happening in the public sector?
The demographic transition and the consequences of the pandemic are also causing a worrying closure of public schools.
“In the last 10 years, this reduction is also significant. Between 2015 and 2022, for example, almost 1,400 public schools were lost in Colombia,” says López Quiroz.
“It is true that the closure of private schools has accelerated in recent years, but I would say that this is more a matter for large capitals and does not represent intermediate cities and other municipalities, where the closure of public schools is very serious,” he added.
The expert says the ratio between public and private schools is much more equal outside of large cities.
In the capitals, public education seems to be holding out a little longer, although this does not mean that closures will occur either.
De Zubiría and Bonilla point out that the losses in the public sector are offset by the absorption of many children leaving the private sector and by Venezuelan migration.
“Many of the 2.8 million Venezuelans that Colombia has welcomed are children and tend to enroll in public schools,” they both agree.
What does this say about education in Colombia?
It should be noted that the closure of private schools does not only affect, as one might suspect, the elites.
According to López Quiroz, the private sector also has a high representation in all educational strata and levels in Colombia.
“What happens is that the private sector has a much more elitist representation than it really is,” he says.
López Quiroz points out that the commotion generated by the closure of private schools can also be explained by how the elite, concentrated in large cities, monopolizes the discourse on what is happening in the rest of the country.
“It is more spectacular, more extravagant, to talk about the disappearance of traditional schools where political and opinion leaders studied. Unfortunately, narratives are produced in Bogotá that distort what is happening at the national level,” he warns.
Beyond the disparities between large cities and the rest of the country, it is clear that education in Colombia is changing.
“Alternative, virtual, home-based methods are emerging, and outdated or traditional methods are having trouble holding up,” says de Zubiría.
And this has consequences for the entire system and all strata.
“If more private schools close, there will be less supply and children will have to attend public schools, which could put more pressure on this sector,” says López Quiroz.
In this regard, de Zubiría says that the current government is doing well in building educational institutions in traditionally abandoned areas, although he believes that there is still work to be done.
“What is obvious is that this government is not betting on private education as the previous ones did, which strengthened and privileged it,” he reflects.
What to expect for the future?
There are different opinions on whether the transformation that Colombian education is undergoing can improve or harm the system.
“Private early education in Colombia is very good. In my opinion, it is the best we have, and it is being destroyed,” says de Zubiría.
“It is a vital stage in which it has been proven that, if it is good, the child will be healthier emotionally and intellectually. I do not know if alternative methods and home schooling contribute to this,” she adds.
Bonilla believes that, although it may be a long way off, if the focus on public education increases, it could happen that private schools become exclusively for the elite.
“In theory, education should level out inequality, but that is not happening in Colombia. The improvement of public services is slower than in reality. There are many gaps between urban and rural areas; between the rich and the poor. To overcome them, we need to increase the focus on education,” he explains.
The disparities in the Colombian educational system have been studied by experts such as López Quiroz.
One of his investigations describes it as “an educational apartheid”, especially in terms of access to and quality of education at the secondary level.
“In our case, we focused on Bogotá and we saw a clear correlation in the much better performance of high-level children who attend the best private schools.”
The analyst adds that this “apartheid” exists throughout the country, especially in terms of quality.
In the latest PISA report published at the end of 2023, Colombian students performed below the OECD average in mathematics, science and reading.
Similarly, a smaller proportion of Colombian students achieved top results in at least one of these subjects compared to the OECD average, and a smaller sample of students achieved only minimal proficiency in all three subjects compared to the OECD average.
The pending tasks of Colombian education seem more complicated than the old public-private, rural-urban, rich-poor debates.
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