Jorge Macri pushes forward with total reform of teaching career: evaluation, presenteeism, and fewer rights

While students, teachers, and families from schools such as Yrurtia, Lola Mora, and Niní Marschall organize against the implementation of BA Aprende, Jorge Macri’s government deepens a structural transformation of Buenos Aires education. The reform is not limited to modifying subjects, content, or school formats. Through the ‘Ser Docente’ policy, approved in March 2026, Mercedes Miguel’s administration began intervening in who enters teacher training colleges, how they are trained, how they access their first position, under what criteria they are evaluated, and what training is rewarded for promotion. Added to this is the recent decree reform of the Teaching Statute regulations, which incorporates covert presenteeism, restricts leave, modifies competitions, and devalues the trajectory built over years in schools.

Read together, all the measures show that we are not facing isolated initiatives. BA Aprende redefines an educational model at the service of the market, which with ‘Ser Docente’ seeks to form a professional profile that this school needs, and UniCABA concentrates the content and training paths favored by the Ministry; while the Statute reform establishes a labor regime of rewards and punishments to discipline those who must implement the educational reform.

The relationship between both policies is written in the official resolution itself. Resolution 385/2026, signed by Mercedes Miguel, states that one of the axes of BA Aprende is the ‘planning of teacher training and career’ and that ‘Ser Docente’ is approved precisely to articulate initial training, entry into the system, and professional development under the same ‘strategic framework.’

These definitions also did not originate with Jorge Macri’s administration. During the years the Federal Education Council operated, resolutions were approved that prepared the ground for this type of reform. CFE Resolution 476/24 establishes guidelines on capacities, curricular reorganization, and teacher profile that the City later translates into its own regulations, such as resolutions 1602/24 (Buenos Aires Aprende), 616/25 (Pedagogical Framework), 890/25 (new curriculum design), and 860/25 (Inclusion Policy). In this sense, CABA functions as a laboratory where an educational orientation that has been under construction for years is implemented more advancedly. While Milei dismantles the national Ministry of Education and empties the Federal Education Council of content, Macri deepens this orientation.

The five axes of ‘Ser Docente’ span the entire professional life of those who teach: entry into teacher training and its support; updating of Jurisdictional Higher Level Curriculum Designs; strengthening of residencies and articulation with access to the first position; evaluation of teaching performance in compulsory levels, oriented toward professional development; and promotion in the teaching career and training for pedagogical leadership.

The first axis began implementation during 2026. All entrants to state-run teacher training programs must take a diagnostic, census-based, mandatory, and nominal reading comprehension evaluation, designed by UEICEE – Comprehensive Evaluation Unit for Quality and Educational Equity – of the City of Buenos Aires. It is a decentralized entity of the Ministry of Education to design, develop, and coordinate evaluation of the City’s educational system. The current executive director is Samanta Bonelli, whose public policy studies are from the London School of Economics and the University of San Andrés. Before joining UEICEE, she was a researcher at Argentinos por la Educación and CIPPEC, national director of Evaluation at the national Ministry of Education, and a consultant for UNICEF.

Entrants must also complete a questionnaire about their educational trajectories, family and work conditions, access to technological resources, and motivations for choosing the career. Those who fail the evaluation — or do not show up without an accepted justification — must complete a virtual, self-paced 60-hour course, with a final in-person evaluation. If they fail again, they must repeat it until they pass. The course runs parallel to the degree program, although the Ministry clarifies that it does not ‘condition’ entry or passing of subjects.

The government presents these measures as ‘support tools.’ But the problem is who produces that information, under what criteria it is evaluated, and what power the Ministry acquires over training trajectories. The same UEICEE that designs and administers evaluations for compulsory levels enters teacher training colleges with a standardized, nominal, digital test. The logic of evaluation and data-based management begins before the future teacher teaches their first class.

The second axis updates Higher Level curriculum designs to align them with the new designs for compulsory levels. This point is central. Teacher training colleges are no longer institutions with the capacity to autonomously debate what teachers the public school needs. Their training must adapt to the reform that the Ministry has already defined for early childhood, primary, and secondary education.

The official policy organizes this training around seven ‘professional capacities,’ the integration of digital education, hybrid modalities, and formats that supposedly would avoid ‘curricular fragmentation.’ Thus, the same language of BA Aprende is reproduced: competencies, capacities, innovation, autonomy, and adaptation to technological changes. The teacher begins to be conceived less as an intellectual worker capable of producing and discussing pedagogical knowledge and more as a competent executor of centrally defined objectives.