While the national government ignores the laws passed by Congress and the judicial rulings that order, among other things, the urgent implementation of the University Financing Law; The Buenos Aires executive is more elegant, he moves with a different political waist: while he discursively highlights public education as indispensable, since December 2023 he deepens the adjustment throughout the sector.
But the elegance of the Buenos Aires administration to say one thing and do another is not only discursive. In practice, it implements delaying maneuvers with the intention of entangling the members of the sector where it implements adjustment measures.
Presentation of documents and unsustainable demands to meet in the short term, change in the rules of the game at the last minute and lack of official response. Since Jorge Macri took office, the City government has implemented the same technique to justify the educational adjustment in different sectors that, a priori, do not present any difficulty: the “against the clock” strategy.
Some concrete examples
At the end of January, a few days before the start of the 2026 school year, five kindergartens located in the most neglected neighborhoods of the City received a visit from personnel from the Government Control Agency (AGC) and members of the City Police. In principle, the objective was to close the nursery schools that same day but, in the face of resistance from the teaching staff and families, the officers improvised an investigation and said that these spaces were not in a position to continue, unless they made several changes or moved to other places.
“First they intimidated us with the police wanting to break into the institutions that were closed. When we demanded a response they told us that the buildings, which have been operating in some cases for more than 15 years, did not meet the minimum conditions to continue functioning as an early childhood educational institution,” he recalled. Time Damián Drescher, initial level teacher.
The kindergartens in question are public nursery schools, managed by the City Ministry of Education together with neighborhood associations and organizations. These educational spaces receive boys and girls from 45 days to three years of age, and operate within the framework of the Educational Inclusion Directorate within the Early Childhood Program of the Buenos Aires Ministry of Education.
“At that moment they told us that we had all the time we wanted to adapt the spaces, we presented the corresponding adaptations, also the proposals with new buildings, with plans made by architects, and with professionals who know all the regulations, but they were rejecting each of the plans that we presented, they gave us new excuses and requirements, instead of telling us everything upfront about what was needed. Sooner or later we realized that behind these excuses was hidden the political decision to close the kindergartens,” added the teacher.
“So they were lying to us throughout the month of February until they told us ‘well, start thinking about next year because this year the school year has already started’, but while they were making excuses, from behind they were calling families offering them vacancies in Early Childhood Centers that are not kindergartens, they are super precarious spaces that are under the orbit of the Ministry of Human Development and not Education.”
The Buenos Aires government used the same strategy to report the closure of the Fray Justo de Santa María de La Paternal School, for the elimination of the ESI higher education postgraduate degree, which has been delaying the time for the start of the 2026 school year, and the most recent event: the closure of divisions and dismissals of teachers in a secondary school in Belgrano.
“Last year they gave us the possibility of choosing whether or not to enter the Buenos Aires Learn reform (the new educational ‘plan’ of Macrismo) and the promise was that if this year the community decided not to enter the new plan, the functional organic plan of the school, that is, everything was going to remain the same,” Gonzalo Besteiro, teacher at the Secondary Education School (EEM) No. 2, told this medium.
A few days before the start of classes, the GCBA failed to keep its promise and, taking advantage of the change of authorities in the Ministry’s Secondary Education Directorate, moved forward with educational cuts under the guise of a reform.
The secondary school is a re-entry school that is characterized by having an inclusive and personalized pedagogical approach. Specifically, the Buenos Aires government eliminated the second division of first, second and third years and fired almost half of the teaching staff.
“Burning an institution as they are doing at the beginning of classes is cruel, anti-pedagogical, it is a policy of abandonment and helplessness of young people who precisely need the opposite. The implementation of this measure, as was done last Wednesday, represents destroying a very important inclusion project by firing half of the teachers, crowding 45 kids into the classrooms, and forcing school dropouts, discouragement and anguish,” Besteiro concludes.
In dialogue with Time, An advisor to the educational portfolio warned that the adjustment measures will continue in the next two years. “We do not call it cuts or adjustments, they are measures to modernize the entire educational system,” he argued. «
