Strike threat looms as school year approaches

Education Minister Lucy Molinar, left, greets university administrators.
Photo by the Presidencia

Strike talk, threats to replace teachers, legal skirmishing, unready buildings as March 8 back-to-school day approaches

Showdown time in Panama's public school system?
by Eric Jackson

In movement parlance, the teachers' unions are part of the popular forces but in more mundane political reality they're not popular at all. Neither are the politicians, several of whom are controversially out on bail as they face criminal charges for having looted the public school system under the previous administration.

It is well nigh impossible to find anyone in Panama who is satisfied with the state of public education, and it wasn't viable for President Martinelli to go back to the apparatchiki from the last time that his coalition partners ran the Ministry of Education: Doris Rosas de Mata and the Rosas clan notoriously used the public educational institutions --- the schools and public TV --- as their private plantation, to the extent that their insistence that to get good teaching assignments educators had to join, pay dues to and vote the way the Rosases said within the MOLIRENA party went a long way toward both destroying MOLIRENA and creating a climate of widespread corruption and burning resentments in Panamanian public education. (How much corruption? On repeated occasions it has been discovered that teachers had padded their resumes with faked credits, but the practice was so widespread that it was not possible to fire the cheating teachers and still staff the public schools.)

So, after the two final years of a PRD regime in which schools could not open on time, President Martinelli has chosen a morning television show host, Lucy Molinar, as Minister of Education and March 8 is the first back-to-school day on her new job. Molinar is neither a teacher nor an administrator by background, but she is well educated --- an undergraduate journalism degree at the conservative Universidad Catolica de Chile in highly censored Chile during the Pinochet dictatorship, then grad school in philosophy at the even more reactionary Universidad de Navarra in Spain, which is one of the flagship institutions of the right-wing Catholic organization Opus Dei. (Molinar herself is a member of Opus Dei, as are several other high-ranking members of the Martinelli administration.)

There are half a dozen significant teachers' unions in Panama, which for collective bargaining purposes come together as the Teachers Action Front (Frente de Acción Magisterial, or FAM). The largest of these, the Panamanian Teachers Association (ASOPROF) and the Veraguas Educators Association (AEVE), are leftist-led and key players in the FRENADESO and ULIP labor/left alliances respectively.

There is also a group called the Teachers Unity Coordinator (CUM), which includes some small organizations aligned with the PRD and claims, rather speciously, to speak for the unorganized public school teachers. The Torrijos administration treated and some of the more strident anti-labor media treat CUM as a viable group that speaks for a constituency, but due to the PRD orientation there remains great doubt as to whether Martinelli can play them as a pawn against FAM, as Torrijos did.

A master contract that addresses wages is not an issue at this time, but there are a number of working conditions issues between the government and the unions, most notably in the remote areas, where teachers must make long and sometimes dangerous journeys to get to the often primitive villages where they are assigned to work. There are protests, both from the FAM unions and from CUM, that the Ministry of Education has not posted the lists of all the teaching job openings, a failure that is taken as evidence of political manipulation of hiring decisions.

There is also the matter of inadequate school buildings. Molinar has admitted that a number of schools won't be ready for the start of the school year, and has been scrambling to get temporary substitute spaces together while work continues. In a number of schools, prison convicts are doing repairs and teacher unions and parent groups have expressed concerns about this, both as a matter of organized labor's traditional antipathy towards the use of convict labor and out of fears of unwholesome contacts between students and criminals.

The big issue, however, is about curriculum reform. Molinar has promised that sweeping reforms like the one proposed but not implemented by the Torrijos administration, which would have for the most part eliminated the teaching of music, art, physical education and history and thrown most of the teachers of those subjects out of work, will not be implemented in such a way that people will lose their jobs.

So what is the content of the Martinelli administration's curriculum reform? As of a few days before the start of the school year, that's not public information. It is known that some schools have been chosen for pilot programs that would substantially change the subjects that kids study, and it is also known that in the rest of the public school system there will be some different textbooks used in various subjects. However, the FAM unions complain that the teachers have not yet seen the books that they are supposed to use in their classes.

The curriculum changes were set forth cryptically in a December 21 decree, and the FAM unions promptly sued because, in violation of laws that specify that teachers are to participate in curriculum change decisions, they had no input into its formulation and were taken somewhat by surprise.

The union leaders acknowledge that the public schools are in sad shape and that curriculum is one of the things that must be modernized. However, they reject the advice that successive governments have been given by such international organizations as the United Nations Development Program and the World Bank, that spending on public education should be cut and more narrowly channeled into basic subjects like reading and math. Moreover, the leftists among the union leaders are absolutely indisposed to accept any unspecified thing with the "reform" label attached coming from a member of Opus Dei. After a decade of breathtaking corruption in the public schools, they're still not so desperate that they are willing to give a blank check to the religious right.

When the teachers' unions challenged the December 21 decree before the Supreme Court's administrative bench, the court's acceptance of the suit automatically stayed its implementation. AEVE warned school administrators in Veraguas and Lucy Molinar that they would file criminal charges if the stay was violated. However, on the afternoon of March 3 the court ruled that while the suit was still pending, the stay would be lifted.

Molinar, meanwhile, threatened to fire any teacher who went on strike. In much of the corporate mainstream media, in particular the television stations but also in some of the daily newspapers, the teachers' unions and their leaders were the targets of hard criticism. A common theme was the allegation that the teachers are barely literate themselves, so of course their students fail to learn.

Meanwhile, certain discussions have been "off the table." Shouldn't Panamanian public school students be attending schools for full days? But that would require hiring extra teachers and building more classrooms, while the Martinelli education plan is about austerity. Shouldn't academic fraud get an educator barred from public education forever, and shouldn't the operators of diploma and certification mills that issue papers by which teachers claim to have taken courses that they never did be criminally prosecuted? But even the rector of the University of Panama has a fake doctorate, and the diploma mill thugs tend to have political connections. Under the circumstances one might expect the leaders of radical teachers' unions to advocate a cultural revolution, but they're mainly just stuck in defensive battles over jobs and working conditions.

The FAM unions have a strike committee and even CUM doesn't rule out a walkout, but with the start of the school year looming it appears unlikely that more than a token one-day walkout could be sustained. However, if teachers come back to schools without water or electricity, or schools under construction, there are likely to be local strikes at those facilities. There is a national protest march against the curriculum reform scheduled for March 18, and that's a logical time for calculations to be made about whether there will or will not be a serious strike.

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