Former Minister Cataldo supports advances in education: "The system has returned to pre-pandemic results."

Former Education Minister Nicolás Cataldo defended that the government of former President Boric was the one that truly faced an emergency, not that of the current president José Antonio Kast, who persistently tries to claim that title. “When we reached 2022, we were coming out of a pandemic with students confined at home, and learning had regressed by 10 years,” he stated, also recalling the critically low attendance and the deterioration of school infrastructure that they sought to overcome with a reactivation plan. “By the end of the period, whether one likes it or not, one can say that the system returned to pre-pandemic results,” he said, pointing to the historical results in the SIMCE 2024, the recovery of attendance close to 88%, and the progress of the SLEP, despite the problems presented by the Atacama Service: “We managed to restore a relatively normalized system with a trend towards improvement,” he specified.

Regarding pending issues such as school violence, he mentioned that there is a program being implemented called “A convivir se Aprende” and that its current critical state must be addressed in an intersectoral manner and not just through tough policies: “Chile has 3. 2 million students, 200,000 teachers, 100,000 education assistants, and 10,500 schools. ” Although expulsions via Aula Segura have tripled in recent years, reaching 2,500 cases, he considered that this is not significant for the total student body: “It cannot be specified that schools are out of control, but if we do not address mental health more structurally, this will not stop,” he said about the importance of continuing the processing of the School Coexistence Law: “The worst that can happen is that parents do not send their children to school.

” Regarding the State Guaranteed Credit, the former minister indicated that its debate is projected to be complex at a time when the government claims to reduce costs and shrink the public budget. This is in contrast to the FES bill - not approved by the previous Congress - which aimed at savings without taking away rights and sought to remove banks from the system: “In the world of the indebted, there are those who may have paid, but there are others who have had a very hard time, people who entered the higher education system with the promise of having a career. ” In this regard, Cataldo was critical of the unfulfilled and inorganic market offering, where the CAE was designed for 35,000 students and ended up reaching 350,000: He also added that for the treasury, the CAE represents a huge expense, a situation that does not allow understanding the executive's decision to discard the FES: “What I do not understand is that if there is such a great concern to reduce public spending and if there is a project that supported it to direct resources to other sectors like preschool and early childhood education, then there is an inconsistency in that,” pointed out the former Secretary of State.