Beyond Numbers and Ideology: What the Divergent Educational Paths of Colombia and El Salvador Reveal About the Future of Latin American Schooling

By Global Education Desk

Main Facts

The debate over the future of public education in Latin America has crystallized around two fundamentally distinct models of state intervention: the broad, rights-based expansion championed by Gustavo Petro’s administration in Colombia, and the laser-focused, holistic infrastructural and pedagogical overhaul embodied by the Mi Nueva Escuela strategy in El Salvador.

While Colombia has historically prioritized universal access, public financing, expansive teachers’ unions, and social safety nets—such as school feeding programs—its student performance indicators have remained largely stagnant. According to recent data from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2025 cycle, Colombia scored 381 in mathematics, 399 in reading, and 414 in science, showing negligible progress compared to 2022 levels.

Conversely, El Salvador, starting from a historically lower baseline across its national system, has deployed an aggressive, centralized strategy targeting the classroom and school as the primary units of transformation. By simultaneously overhauling infrastructure, updating curricula, reforming early childhood education, integrating technology, and addressing student health and nutrition, the Salvadoran government has catalyzed localized leaps in learning. Notably, a subset of 171 schools subjected to an intensive phase of the Salvadoran intervention reported learning outcomes dramatically superior to the national average.

These divergent paths underscore a mounting crisis in educational management across the region: the friction between expanding educational rights and guaranteeing measurable learning outcomes. In Colombia, despite multi-layered governmental efforts such as the Ptafi 3.0 program—which aims to reach thousands of schools with tutoring, socio-emotional support, and curricular harmonization—results remain sluggish. Critics point to structural dispersion, fragmented institutional governance, and an entrenched union leadership under Fecode (Federación Colombiana de Trabajadores de la Educación) that heavily prioritizes labor protections over accountability for student performance.

The core challenge for Colombia—and Latin America at large—is transitioning from a bureaucratic matrix of disconnected programs and top-down negotiations to coherent, territorially driven learning ecosystems.

Chronology of Educational Reforms and Evaluations

To understand how Colombia and El Salvador arrived at their current educational junctions, it is necessary to examine the historical trajectory of their policy implementations and benchmark assessments over the past decade.

• 2018–2022 (The Pre-Pandemic Baseline): Both nations grapple with historical deficits in rural infrastructure, high dropout rates, and unequal learning outcomes. Colombia establishes itself as a regional reference point for universal coverage and rights-based education, yet struggles with stagnant learning quality in international standardized tests like PISA.
• 2021 (El Salvador’s Turning Point): The administration of Nayib Bukele launches the Mi Nueva Escuela (My New School) master plan. Abandoning piecemeal reforms, the state moves to simultaneously reconstruct physical facilities, digitize classrooms, overhaul early childhood frameworks, and implement strict teacher training protocols.
• 2022 (Gustavo Petro Takes Office in Colombia): Petro assumes the presidency with a progressive platform centered on the democratization of knowledge, systemic expansion of public financing, structural support for the teaching profession, and the implementation of integral training models through initiatives like the Programa Todos a Aprender (PTA).
• 2022–2024 (Divergent Implementation Phase):
  • Colombia deploys Ptafi 3.0, attempting to reach thousands of establishments via pedagogical mentoring and socio-emotional support. However, policy dispersion across municipalities, departments, and national entities leads to a disconnect between financial investment and classroom reality.
  • El Salvador accelerates its classroom-centric interventions, scaling up infrastructure transformations and digital integration while monitoring localized academic impacts.
• Late 2025 (PISA Results Release): The OECD publishes the PISA 2025 results. Colombia registers 381 points in mathematics, 399 in reading, and 414 in science—reflecting flat growth relative to 2022. Concurrently, initial data from El Salvador’s 171 intensive intervention schools reveal a sharp positive deviation from historical baselines.
• 2026 (The Current Debate): Policymakers, multilateral organizations, and academic institutions scrutinize the structural limitations of Colombia’s reform efforts, turning a critical eye toward the political weight of Fecode and the necessity of regional, decentralized educational architectures.

Supporting Data and Comparative Metrics

An empirical examination of the PISA 2025 datasets and domestic program rollouts reveals stark contrasts in how resources translate—or fail to translate—into cognitive gains.

1. The PISA 2025 Benchmark

• Colombia National Averages:
  • Mathematics: 381 points (Stagnant compared to 2022)
  • Reading: 399 points (Marginal variance)
  • Science: 414 points (Plateaued growth)
• El Salvador Systemic vs. Targeted Performance:
  • While El Salvador’s national macro-system continues to trail Colombia in aggregate scores, a cohort of 171 schools integrated into the intensive Mi Nueva Escuela pilot reported standardized gains that drastically outpace the broader national mean. Though methodological caution is urged by analysts regarding sample selection, the directional trend points toward the efficacy of holistic, simultaneous inputs.

2. Policy Inputs vs. Structural Outcomes

• Colombia’s Investment Paradox: The Colombian Ministry of National Education has systematically expanded budgets, teachers’ payrolls, and school feeding programs. Nevertheless, organizational complexity—divided among national directives, departmental secretariats, and municipal execution—creates a broken chain of implementation. Funds arrive at institutions, but fail to systematically alter pedagogical practices or instructional time.
• El Salvador’s Matrix Intervention: The Salvadoran model treats the individual classroom as an interconnected ecosystem. Rather than introducing isolated variables (e.g., distributing laptops without training or reforming curricula without fixing roofs), the state intervenes simultaneously across seven vectors: infrastructure, curriculum, early childhood, teacher professionalization, technology, health, and nutrition.

Official Responses and Institutional Perspectives

The ideological and methodological clash between these two models has drawn sharp reactions from key political, union, and multilateral stakeholders.

The Colombian Government and the Ministry of Education

Proponents of the Petro administration’s strategy defend the focus on rights and social equity, arguing that cognitive tests like PISA fail to capture the holistic development, social inclusion, and democratic values fostered by expansive public schooling. Ministry officials emphasize that no educational system can thrive while ignoring the basic socio-economic vulnerabilities of its student population. Consequently, programs like Ptafi 3.0 are viewed as essential steps toward closing historical opportunity gaps, even if structural metrics take time to shift.

The Critical Perspective on Fecode

The role of Fecode (the Colombian Federation of Educators) has emerged as a central flashpoint in domestic debates. While historical recognition is universally granted to the union for defending public education funding and labor stability, economists and education reformers argue that its contemporary impact has turned negative.

Critics maintain that Fecode’s institutional reflex—consistently resisting performance-based teacher evaluations, changes to career promotion metrics, and institutional accountability frameworks—places job security above student outcomes. While the union frequently defends its stance by noting that student learning is inextricably linked to poverty, infrastructure deficits, and territorial violence, reformers counter that this legitimate observation should serve as a catalyst for designing better evaluation systems, rather than dismantling professional accountability altogether.

Multilateral and Academic Assessments

Organizations such as the OECD and regional development banks have increasingly emphasized that financial input without pedagogical alignment is an inefficient use of public funds. Observers point out that El Salvador’s aggressive, centralized focus demonstrates that rapid improvements are possible when political will is harnessed to synchronize every level of the school environment, challenging the fatalistic assumption that structural poverty condemns students to perpetual academic underperformance.

Strategic Implications and the Road Ahead for Colombia

To escape the trap of perpetual reform without progress, analysts suggest that Colombia must fundamentally rethink its educational governance. The path forward does not lie in designing yet another centralized, sweeping national decree, but in constructing a robust regional architecture.

1. Decentralized Laboratories of Transformation

Colombia is a nation of immense territorial diversity. A single national curriculum or uniform pedagogical guideline fails to address the realities of a remote rural school in Chocó versus a high-tech secondary institution in Medellín or Bogotá.

Major urban centers and strategic departments—such as Bogotá, Medellín, Barranquilla, Cali, Manizales, and Antioquia—must become autonomous laboratories of educational transformation. These entities possess the administrative capacity to align local secretariats, public and private universities, business sectors, compensation funds (cajas de compensación), civil society, and families around verifiable, localized targets for learning and student well-being.

2. Comprehensive Territorial Ecosystems

Regional strategies must abandon siloed approaches and adopt the holistic framework proven effective in comparative international case studies. Localized interventions should simultaneously address:

• Early childhood stimulation and foundational nutrition.
• State-of-the-art infrastructural repair and digital connectivity.
• Continuous, rigorous, and practice-oriented teacher training.
• Targeted remediation programs for learning losses, integrated with artificial intelligence tools and personalized tutoring.

3. The Role of the National Government

Within this decentralized framework, the role of the national government should pivot from micro-managing regional execution to fulfilling three core functions:

1. Sustainable Financing: Ensuring equitable resource distribution to close historical gaps between wealthy and marginalized regions.
2. Standard Setting and Information Production: Establishing transparent, comparable systems of measurement and evaluation.
3. National Cohesion: Intervening directly in regions suffering from institutional fragility or extreme violence to guarantee baseline educational rights.

4. Redefining Union Corresponsibility

Finally, the transformation of Colombian education requires a cultural evolution within its teaching force. Fecode must evolve from a purely defensive labor organization into a partner in professional excellence. True labor dignity cannot be divorced from student success; professional prestige is naturally elevated when educators are held up as agents of measurable cognitive and social mobility.

Conclusion

The divergence between Colombia and El Salvador serves as a vital lesson for Latin America: policy intentions and budgetary expansions alone do not produce learning. True transformation requires aligning every component of the educational ecosystem—infrastructure, pedagogy, technology, nutrition, and teacher accountability—around the child in the classroom. For Colombia, breaking the cycle of stagnation will depend less on grand national pacts and more on disciplined, measurable, and sustained territorial action that endures across political cycles.