From Fossil Fuels Dependence to Shared Futures: What Venezuela’s Pivot Teaches Us, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

 From Fossil Fuels Dependence to Shared Futures: What Venezuela’s Pivot Teaches Us

by

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

January 2, 2026

Venezuela’s recent decision to block oil exports to the United States while prioritizing markets in Asia marks a significant moment in global political economy—one that mainstream U.S. media have only partially addressed. A particularly clear and illuminating explanation is offered in the video published on December 31, 2025 titled, ¡Última hora! Venezuela bloquea exportaciones de petróleo a EE. UU.: lo que los medios no contarán (Breaking News! Venezuela Blocks Oil Exports to the U.S.: What the Media Won’t Tell You) by THAN Noticias, which situates this move within the broader context of U.S. sanctions, energy geopolitics, and a shifting multipolar world (THAN Noticias, 2024).

Read through this lens, Venezuela’s oil pivot is not simply a story about energy markets or foreign policy. It is a reminder that we live in an era of shared futures—in which sanctions, climate decisions, migration flows, and economic instability do not stop at national borders, but circulate through communities, classrooms, and institutions far from their point of origin.

As the analysis explains, decades of U.S. reliance on Venezuelan heavy crude—especially by Gulf Coast refineries designed for it—have been disrupted not simply by market forces, but by sustained sanctions that have failed to produce regime change even as it resulted in enormous suffering by Venezuelans, prompting millions to migrate to other countries, including the United States—demonstrating how policies framed as “foreign” quickly become domestic realities in societies shaped by shared economic and human futures.

Weisbrot & Sachs (2019) offer an excellent scholarly analysis on the complexity of responses to sanctions by targeted countries. Reviewing the evidence from the Global Sanctions Data Base, they find broad agreement that sanctions tend to reduce trade, investment, growth, and stability in target states, with effects that can persist long after sanctions end—but that these harms do not reliably translate into political compliance. Targets frequently respond by diverting trade and finance to third countries, shielding favored firms, forming new alliances, and sometimes retaliating—adaptation that can dilute sanctions’ leverage.

In this vein, Venezuela has redirected exports toward China and India, diversified its trading partners, and increasingly conducted transactions outside the U.S. dollar. This outcome reflects a broader pattern identified in the research literature: sanctions often incentivize adaptation and realignment rather than political compliance.

Why should an education blog care? Education is one of the primary institutions where shared futures are either acknowledged or denied—where students learn to see global crises either as someone else’s problem, or conversely, as collective challenges requiring cooperation, historical understanding, and ethical responsibility. One also learns how power operates through ostensibly technical—frequently blunt—policy tools, offering educators concrete case studies for teaching policy analysis, political economy, and global inequality.

Most importantly, this moment underscores two urgent imperatives. First, all nations—including the United States—must accelerate investment in clean and renewable energy technologies. Continued dependence on fossil fuels entrenches geopolitical conflict while delaying the climate transition that future generations will inherit. Second, sustainable global futures require diplomacy grounded in empirical evidence and mutual respect rather than coercion alone. 

Education has a vital role to play here: preparing students not only to understand these systems, but to imagine and build alternatives rooted in cooperation, sustainability, and shared responsibility in an increasingly multipolar world. Hence, despite sanctions, what impacts Venezuela impacts all of us in the U.S.

Disclaimer: I am not an economist so if I've missed anything or if anyone has anything to add, by all means state in the comment box below. Abundant thanks to Dr. Tony Baez for sharing this video with me. I had been meaning to look into this. I'm glad that I did. Happy New Year, everyone!

References

Global Sanctions Data Base. https://www.globalsanctionsdatabase.com/

THAN Noticias. (2024). ¡Última hora! Venezuela bloquea exportaciones de petróleo a EE. UU.: lo que los medios no contarán [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyb53JhDvX0

Weisbrot, M., & Sachs, J. D. (2019). Economic sanctions as collective punishment: The case of Venezuela. Center for Economic and Policy Research. https://cepr.net/images/stories/reports/venezuela-sanctions-2019-04.pdf

Podcast Interview with Dr. Angela Valenzuela on Ethnic Studies, CRT, and Where we Should be Headed in Education

 

Friends,

Happy to share this podcast Interview that took place during the pandemic on Ethnic Studies, CRT, and where we should be headed in education with Dr. Abdín Noboa-Rios and Dr. Tony Baez. You can link directly to this interview below or view it here on Youtube.

I listened to it recently and happened to like my responses to Drs. Noboa-Rios and Baez' questions. 

As I think about Ethnic Studies and Critical Race Theory (CRT), my biggest concern is not solely with the mischaracterizations but also with the anti-intellectual agenda of not wanting to know minoritized or subaltern voices, histories, cultures, languages, identities, ways of knowing and so on when so much of what they're about is redemptive, intellectually expansive, and fully enhancing of everybody's lived experience.  I speak of these kinds of things in the podcast. 

Someday, Ethnic Studies will simply be called "a good education." Check out the Educa K-16 Podcast sponsored by the The DoMas Group and the various interesting interviews they've gathered over the years.

-Angela Valenzuela

Woe to us if the case of a Catholic-run charter school reaches the Supreme Court by Katherine Stewart | MSNBC

Woe to us indeed should this Catholic-run charter school out of Oklahoma make it to the U.S. Supreme Court (SCOTUS). It's sickening to think that a SCOTUS decision in this case could very well institute, in effect, "Catholic Sharia Law" by allowing our public tax dollars to flow into Catholic-run charters and other religious schools where, of course, religious doctrine would get taught. 

As covered by Stewart herein, of great importance is a loss of rights for employees, including teachers and administrators, as well as students in such schools would experience—including First Amendment rights and the right of due process. This is because religious schools "are exempt from laws that protect students and employees alike from broad categories of discrimination." The "ministerial exception" option available to religious institutions is an open door to discrimination, leaving victims defenseless.

This does not at all represent societal progress, but is rather a step backwards should the highest court rule on this. Thanks to Dr. Tony Baez for sharing. We are duly warned. 

-Angela Valenzuela

Woe to us if the case of a Catholic-run charter school reaches the Supreme Court

Though transparently unconstitutional, an Oklahoma school board's decision may still be blessed by the radical conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court.

Pastoral Center Offices for the Archdiocese of Oklahoma in Oklahoma City last year.Google Maps

June 7, 2023, 6:01 PM CDT

By Katherine Stewart, author of "The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism"

Since the 19th century, when the Catholic Church and other Christian denominations asked for a share of tax money to fund their own sectarian religious schools, it has been a matter of settled constitutional law that commingling public education and sectarian religion is impermissible. That is why what happened Monday in Oklahoma is so disturbing and significant. Over the objections of the state’s attorney general, Oklahoma’s Statewide Virtual Charter School Board voted to approve an application from the Catholic Archdiocese of Oklahoma for a publicly funded charter school.

The board put the archdiocese on the path to provide a Christian education paid for by the state. Though transparently unconstitutional, this arrangement may still be blessed by the radical conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court, which has issued a series a rulings in recent years that use a specious idea of religious freedom to promote the establishment of religion.

For example, after the majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization overturned Roe v. Wade, Notre Dame Law School hosted a conference in Rome at which Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito framed “religious liberty” as deference to those with certain religious viewpoints. The principle may sound equitable, but in practice it is a lightly disguised means of privileging conservative Christians.

Consider, too, that in December, former Oklahoma Attorney General John O’Connor said recent decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court had cleared the way for public funding for schools that promote religious doctrines and are under sectarian control.  

It’s not just the U.S. Constitution that should have stopped the board from approving the application to create St. Isidore of Seville Virtual Charter School. Oklahoma law specifically prohibits charter schools from being sectarian. “The approval of any publicly funded religious school is contrary to Oklahoma law and not in the best interest of taxpayers,” Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond said after the board voted. “It’s extremely disappointing that board members violated their oath in order to fund religious schools with our tax dollars. In doing so, these members have exposed themselves and the state to potential legal action that could be costly.”

Rachel Laser, president and CEO of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, said in a statement: “It’s hard to think of a clearer violation of the religious freedom of Oklahoma taxpayers and public-school families than the state establishing the nation’s first religious public charter school. This is a sea change for American democracy.”

In testimony to the state's virtual charter school board in February, Ken Upton, an attorney for Americans United, cited “teaching religion, sponsoring prayer, discriminating based on religion, or otherwise promoting religion or coercing students to take part in religious activities” in saying, “St. Isidore makes clear in its application that it intends to do all these things.”

The archdiocese has on its side some powerful allies from the same conservative legal movement that helped secure a majority on the Supreme Court, including the Notre Dame Religious Liberty Clinic at Notre Dame Law School. Formed in 2020, the clinic has deep ties to the Federalist Society and the ultraconservative members of the Supreme Court. The clinic’s director, Stephanie Barclay, clerked for Justice Neil Gorsuch and litigated cases for the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty. An associate dean, Nicole Stelle Garnett, clerked for Justice Clarence Thomas and has written approvingly of the Supreme Court’s decision last year in Carson v. Makin, which expanded taxpayer funding for religious schools in Maine, and for which the clinic submitted an amicus brief.

Given the record of the Supreme Court’s right-wing majority in cases involving so-called religious freedom, supporters of St. Isidore have good reason to believe that majority will say St. Isidore can use public money to support its sectarian program — clearing the way for a future in which large amounts of money flow from local, state and federal treasuries into religious networks with clear political agendas and significant influence over public education.

As bad as such a Supreme Court ruling would be, perhaps even worse would be a decision that says such schools could discriminate against anybody or any group that offends their religious sensibilities. But this is precisely what the groups behind the Oklahoma religious charter school are teeing up in Colorado. The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty is representing Faith Bible Chapel International in a case arguing for a “ministerial exception” to anti-discrimination laws at religious schools. 

In that case, Greg Tucker, a white man who served for 14 years as a teacher and the director of student life at the private religious school, adopted a Black daughter, after which some students started to refer to his family using racial slurs. After he tried to establish a symposium for students to address racism, he was fired. Tucker maintains that the firing was blatantly retaliatory and discriminatory.

The school is claiming a “ministerial exception” to anti-discrimination law. Such exceptions are intended to allow religious employers to avoid liability when they fire “ministers” and clergy. Although Tucker was not a “minister,” but rather a teacher, with no responsibility for theological instruction or significant religious functions as part of his job, the school is trying to use “ministerial exception” as a trump card against his claim that it practiced racial discrimination. A divided 2-1 panel at the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against the church, which has appealed to the Supreme Court. 

Given the tolerance for discrimination in the name of religion that the Supreme Court has demonstrated in cases such as Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores Inc., which let certain companies deny birth control coverage to their employees, and in Hosanna-Tabor v. EEOC, which says fired clergy cannot sue for discrimination, and given the court's eagerness to support the public funding of religious schools it has demonstrated in Carson v. Makin, it is reasonable to fear two things: that this court will decide not only that tax dollars can be used to fund religious schools but also that religious schools are exempt from laws that protect students and employees alike from broad categories of discrimination.

If the Faith Bible Chapel International and St. Isidore cases are heard before this Supreme Court, it seems likely that public education in the U.S. is about to change for the worse in the same way the Dobbs ruling changed women’s health care for the worse.

Make no mistake: America’s Christian right is taking direct aim at secular public education, but let’s not forget that it is also after the money. The U.S. spends over $700 billion on public K-12 schools every year. If conservative Christian leaders can lay claim to part of that sum, it could help sustain conservative churches, whose attendance rates are reportedly falling.

Religious right leaders have long claimed that they are the true victims of religious persecution in the U.S. They have not disguised their aim of using public resources, including government facilities and taxpayer money, to impose their values on other people, including other people’s children. Now that they have the Supreme Court they want, their goal may be within reach.

Katherine Stewart

Katherine Stewart is the author of "The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism" (Bloomsbury). Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post and The New Republic.

On Mexicans, Breakfast Tacos and Anthony Bourdain

The recent story about First lady Dr. Jill Biden comparing Texas Latinos to breakfast tacos—for which she has since apologized—helps illustrate how a little bit of cultural competence can go a long way. An uncle of mine joked that had the comparison been to "salsa," we could at least be "hot." Dr. Biden's mistake maps on to a larger issue of invisibility and disparagement of Latinos—in this case, Mexican-origin people—in the Democratic Party and the polity, as a whole. For instance read the pertinent piece, "Democrats Still Have a Latinx Blind Spot: Understanding Far-Right Republican Mayra Flores' recent Congressional Victory" that I just posted. A cool, measured, affirming response to Mexican and Mexican American disparagement is provided by none other than the late Anthony Bourdain. 

Mexico is, in many ways, the best kept secret in the world. I just returned from an awesome trip to Oaxaca, Oaxaca, Mexico. I couldn't agree more. All I would add to this is that on the whole, Mexican Americans are pretty amazing too! Thanks to Dr. Tony Baez for sharing. 😁

-Angela Valenzuela

On Mexicans

by

Anthony Bourdain

Americans love Mexican food. We consume nachos, tacos, burritos, tortas, enchiladas, tamales and anything resembling Mexican in enormous quantities.

We love Mexican beverages, happily knocking back huge amounts of tequila, mezcal, and Mexican beer every year. We love Mexican people—we sure employ a lot of them.

Despite our ridiculously hypocritical attitudes towards immigration, we demand that Mexicans cook a large percentage of the food we eat, grow the ingredients we need to make that food, clean our houses, mow our lawns, wash our dishes, and look after our children.

As any chef will tell you, our entire service economy—the restaurant business as we know it—in most American cities, would collapse overnight without Mexican workers. Some, of course, like to claim that Mexicans are “stealing American jobs.”

But in two decades as a chef and employer, I never had ONE American kid walk in my door and apply for a dishwashing job, a porter’s position—or even a job as a prep cook. Mexicans do much of the work in this country that Americans, probably, simply won’t do.

We love Mexican drugs. Maybe not you personally, but “we”, as a nation, certainly consume titanic amounts of them—and go to extraordinary lengths and expense to acquire them. We love Mexican music, Mexican beaches, Mexican architecture, interior design, Mexican films.

So, why don’t we love Mexico?

We throw up our hands and shrug at what happens and what is happening just across the border. Maybe we are embarrassed. Mexico, after all, has always been there for us, to service our darkest needs and desires.

Whether it’s dress up like fools and get passed-out drunk and sunburned on spring break in Cancun, throw pesos at strippers in Tijuana, or get toasted on Mexican drugs, we are seldom on our best behavior in Mexico. They have seen many of us at our worst. They know our darkest desires.

In the service of our appetites, we spend billions and billions of dollars each year on Mexican drugs—while at the same time spending billions and billions more trying to prevent those drugs from reaching us.

The effect on our society is everywhere to be seen. Whether it’s kids nodding off and overdosing in small town Vermont, gang violence in L.A., burned out neighborhoods in Detroit—it’s there to see.

What we don’t see, however, haven’t really noticed, and don’t seem to much care about, is the 80,000 dead in Mexico, just in the past few years—mostly innocent victims. Eighty thousand families who’ve been touched directly by the so-called “War On Drugs”.

Mexico. Our brother from another mother. A country, with whom, like it or not, we are inexorably, deeply involved, in a close but often uncomfortable embrace.

Look at it. It’s beautiful. It has some of the most ravishingly beautiful beaches on earth. Mountains, desert, jungle. Beautiful colonial architecture, a tragic, elegant, violent, ludicrous, heroic, lamentable, heartbreaking history. Mexican wine country rivals Tuscany for gorgeousness.

Its archeological sites—the remnants of great empires, unrivaled anywhere. And as much as we think we know and love it, we have barely scratched the surface of what Mexican food really is. It is NOT melted cheese over tortilla chips. It is not simple, or easy. It is not simply “bro food” at halftime.

It is in fact, old—older even than the great cuisines of Europe, and often deeply complex, refined, subtle, and sophisticated. A true mole sauce, for instance, can take DAYS to make, a balance of freshly (always fresh) ingredients painstakingly prepared by hand. It could be, should be, one of the most exciting cuisines on the planet, if we paid attention.

The old school cooks of Oaxaca make some of the more difficult and nuanced sauces in gastronomy. And some of the new generation—many of whom have trained in the kitchens of America and Europe—have returned home to take Mexican food to new and thrilling heights.

It’s a country I feel particularly attached to and grateful for. In nearly 30 years of cooking professionally, just about every time I walked into a new kitchen, it was a Mexican guy who looked after me, had my back, showed me what was what, and was there—and on the case—when the cooks like me, with backgrounds like mine, ran away to go skiing or surfing or simply flaked. I have been fortunate to track where some of those cooks come from, to go back home with them.

To small towns populated mostly by women—where in the evening, families gather at the town’s phone kiosk, waiting for calls from their husbands, sons and brothers who have left to work in our kitchens in the cities of the North.

I have been fortunate enough to see where that affinity for cooking comes from, to experience moms and grandmothers preparing many delicious things, with pride and real love, passing that food made by hand from their hands to mine.

In years of making television in Mexico, it’s one of the places we, as a crew, are happiest when the day’s work is over. We’ll gather around a street stall and order soft tacos with fresh, bright, delicious salsas, drink cold Mexican beer, sip smoky mezcals, and listen with moist eyes to sentimental songs from street musicians. We will look around and remark, for the hundredth time, what an extraordinary place this is.

Quechua Children's Choir—Coro de niños de Espinar K'ana wawakunas: Ch'aska Ñawi Niñucha.

Such beautiful music sung by an Indigenous children's choir singing in the Quechua language. I wish I new what they were saying. I love their energy. This brought such happiness to me today. Our Indigenous communities in this hemisphere have so very much to offer the world.

Thanks to Dr. Tony Baez for sharing.

-Angela Valenzuela

Cherán, an Indigenous Municipality without Criminals or Politicians

This is a wonderful story of a Mexican community named Cherán located in Michoacán, Mexico where women took the lead in helping the city to become a government-recognized, autonomous Indigenous purépecha community that expelled the criminals that were illegally logging the land. They expelled the politicians, too.  

Do read the whole story. They have recovered some of the losses committed by organized crime beginning in 2008 that resulted in the deforestation of 17,000 hectares such that today, the people of Cherán have reforested 3,000 hectares. And their crime rate is down by 73 percent to boot.

They are an inspiration to communities throughout Mexico, and to the environmentalist movement, as well.

Thanks to Dr. Tony Baez for sharing.

-Angela Valenzuela

Cherán, el municipio indígena sin criminales ni políticos

April 15, 2020 | México Desconocido

En 2011 las mujeres de Cherán decidieron proteger los bosques. Te contamos sobre esta comunidad ecologista y con gobierno autónomo.

La madruga del 15 de abril de 2011 las campanas del municipio michoacano de Cherán retumbaron. Se alertaba a la población sobre un movimiento que hacía frente a la devastación ecológica.

[photo]

Cherán es un municipio ubicado en el centro del estado de Michoacán. De acuerdo con los censos, la mayor parte de la población pertenece a la etnia purépecha. Su clima es templado, lo cual favorece el crecimiento de bosques de pino y encino, que a su vez es el hábitat de mapaches, cacomixtles, coyotes, armadillos, etcétera.

Guardianas del bosque

Debido a su riqueza maderera, a partir de 2005 comenzó a ser objetivo de la tala ilegal por grupos criminales, quienes llegaban a extraer de 100 a 150 camiones llenos de troncos.

Como consecuencia, la actividad delictiva aumentó y el ecocidio prometía la escasez y la sequía en los ojos de agua. De acuerdo con los habitantes, los grupos delictivos buscaban deforestar la zona para convertir la tierra en campos de aguacate. Aunque pareciera un acto progresista, el aguacate daña los suelos al requerir grandes cantidades de agua.

Pese a que el aguacate es de los productos mexicanos mejor vendidos en Estados Unidos y Japón, el costo es alto. Michoacán es el principal productor de aguacates de México, pero también presenta grandes problemas por el cambio de suelo. Es posible apreciar dónde inicia el aguacate y dónde el bosque.

Sumado a lo anterior, los criminales comenzaron a secuestrar mujeres y niños. Para defender la naturaleza, un grupo de mujeres se dirigió a los delincuentes para tratar de razonar con ellos. Sin embargo, solo recibieron insultos y amenazas. Fue entonces cuando decidieron actuar.

Como consideraron demasiado peligroso detener a los taladores en el bosque, las mujeres de Cherán realizaron un bloqueo a los camiones. Inmediatamente tomaron rehenes e hicieron sonar las campanas de la iglesia. Simultáneamente, el resto de la población salió a ayudarlas, prendieron fogatas en las esquinas y advirtieron a las autoridades con linchar a los maleantes.

Poco tiempo después llegaron policías, gente armada y el alcalde para liberar a los talamontes. La comunidad de Cherán percibió nexos entre las instituciones de gobierno y los delincuentes, así que los expulsaron a ambos.

A partir de ese momento los partidos políticos fueron prohibidos para evitar divisiones al interior de la comunidad. Los purépechas apostaron a la unión comunal sobre sus intereses individuales.

Cherán, un municipio autónomo

Como nueva forma de gobierno cada uno de los cuatro distritos eligió un representante para el Consejo del Pueblo; crearon puestos de control y seguridad y establecieron nuevas leyes comunitarias. Por ejemplo, entre las sanciones relacionadas al consumo de alcohol se cumplen con trabajo comunitario.

El 13 de noviembre de 2011 el Tribunal Electoral del Poder Judicial de la Federación aprobó la elección del ayuntamiento bajo el sistema de usos y costumbres.

De acuerdo con la Constitución Política de los Estados Unidos Mexicanos, las comunidades indígenas tienen derecho a establecer su propia forma de gobierno; dicho gobierno también fue avalado por la Suprema Corte de Justicia de la Nación.

Un proyecto de comunidad

Se calcula que el crimen organizado deforestó 17,000 hectáreas a partir de 2008. Actualmente, la comunidad de Cherán lleva reforestadas 3,000. Aunque Cherán recibe presupuesto federal y estatal, se reconoce y protege su forma de gobierno.

Entre los logros ambientalistas de Cherán se encuentra la construcción de un captador de aguas de lluvia en el cerro Kukundicata. Para sorpresa de muchos, el captador se convirtió en el más grande de América Latina. Como resultado, se ha logrado garantizar el acceso al líquido vital en la comunidad. En la actualidad apuestan por convertirse en la primera ciudad sin basura de México.

Otras de las tareas que han cumplido con éxito es la baja en las tasas delictivas. En comparación con 2015, Cherán reporta una disminución del 73% en delitos.

Como parte de su proyecto comunitario, los purépechas impulsan desde el Concejo Mayor y el Concejo de Asuntos Civiles mejoras en la educación con una visión no colonial. Para ello, buscan que la lengua y saberes originarios se incluyan en los programas de educación básica.

Hoy por hoy no es posible adquirir propiedades en Cherán, aunque están abiertos e invitan a la gente a conocer su forma de vida. Los visitantes pueden encontrar lugares de alojamiento temporal. El triunfo comunitario busca inspirar a otras poblaciones e incluso se ha popularizado entre los ambientalistas un nuevo concepto: "cheranizarte".

Escuela Nueva Has Transformed Rural Education in Colombia and Now Founder Vicky Colbert Is Expanding Her Methodology Across the Globe

This is a great story about "Escuela Nueva" ("New School"), an award-winning model of schooling in rural Colombia founded by Vicky Colbert who has become an international rock star in education. I read this very closely to get a sense of what makes her model tick such that even urban contexts are adopting it. From what I can tell, it's partnership-based, learner-centered, sensory-rich, asset- and values-based, centered around such core values as expressed herein:

"At its best, Escuela Nueva aims to instill values — responsibility, tolerance, discipline, community — as much as academics. Due to the small class sizes and multi-grade classrooms (known as 'multigrados' in Colombia) common in rural areas, there are always a few students who finish their lessons first and a few that lag behind."

In a conversational and dialogical manner, Escuela Nueva cultivates such values of citizenship as leadership and autonomy that in turn occur through a strong focus on student government, as well as student “'work committees' that can include categories like sports and recreation, the environment, and even cleaning. Each group consists of a few representatives who plan events and activities."

With the help of Escuela Nueva's signature workbooks, I would guess, the teachers' role is primarily that of coach with teachers mentoring each other and meetings consisting more about "mentorship and open discussion" than detailed course planning. Though the schools appear to do well on standardized tests, test-prep is not their focus.

Rural education is a challenge everywhere and Vicky Colbert is making a huge difference. My main question is the role of culturally relevant, perhaps Indigenous or rural education. Are they educating children to ultimately leave the rural areas or to strengthen the local economies so that at least some students will remain in them and develop them. What specifically does the curriculum consist of?

Colbert's influences that have found their way into Escuela Nueva's teaching an curriculum, specifically, Montessori, John Dewey, and Vygotsky, certainly suggest learner-centered, experience-based, and socioculturally focused theoretical elements that appear to be making a difference.

Do read this in its entirety as it definitely has elements like teamwork and multiage grading, personalized learning, and student autonomy and leadership that we can apply here in the Texas and the U.S.

Thanks to my colleague, Tony Baez, for sharing.

-Angela Valenzuela


Escuela Nueva Has Transformed Rural Education in Colombia and Now Founder Vicky Colbert Is Expanding Her Methodology Across the Globe

Posted On December 1, 2017
By : Jared Wade


Vicky Colbert has spent more than 40 years building an acclaimed model for rural education in Colombia. Now, she has another $3.9 Million USD in funding from the Yidan Prize to support even more global growth for Escuela Nueva as the revolutionary learning methodology pushes into Africa and Asia.

For more than four decades, Vicky Colbert has dedicated herself to improving rural education. Her work began in the 1970s, when the situation in her native Colombia was grim. Guerrilla conflict and disorder had already become the prevailing reality in many areas and, combined with scarce resources and under-development, millions of children were entering adulthood without the knowledge and skills to make a decent living.

Vicky Colbert, founder of Fundación Escuela Nueva, was the first recipient of the Yidan Prize for Educational Development. (Credit: Jared Wade)

Colbert was young and idealistic. Blond and fair-skinned, the Bogotá-born sociologist wanted to make a difference. She studied at top schools and worked to find solutions. As things progressed, she started to see a new path forward.

But back then, even on her most ambitious days, Colbert never envisioned just how much impact she would eventually make.

While she has had many successes, the latest came in the form of the Yidan Prize for Educational Development. This educational honor was awarded for the first time this year and is already among the world’s most lucrative education awards, giving Colbert and her Escuela Nueva Foundation roughly $3.9 million USD in funding — a massive windfall in a realm where the budgets and grant money are never enough.

This is far from the first award for Colbert or Escuela Nueva (“New School”), which has become an internationally acclaimed teaching model whose principles have been adopted in more than a dozen countries since it has proven its worth in Colombia.

In 2005, she earned the first-ever Clinton Global Citizen Award, a prestigious honor now given out annually by the foundation of former U.S. President Bill Clinton and former U.S. secretary of state Hillary Clinton. She later won the World Innovation Summit for Education (WISE) Prize in 2009 — the first time that the Qatar Foundation handed out its global education prize.

It seems that whenever a new prominent global recognition is created, Colbert’s name tops the list. And so it was this year for the new Yidan Prize created by Chinese entrepreneur and philanthropist Charles Chen Yidan.

Yidan has said that one reason education is close to his heart is because his grandmother never learned to read. It took just two generations of studious learning, however, for the family to watch Chen not only earn degrees in applied chemistry and economic law but use his knowledge to help develop one of the globe’s biggest companies. With no need to work any longer, the billionaire co-founder of conglomerate Tencent wanted to use his money to help fund education.

Colbert was the perfect recipients for the inaugural award. On top of the work her foundation has done in Colombia, Dorothy Gordon, head of the Yidan Prize judging panel, praised Escuela Nueva for continuing to expand to other areas of the world. Gordon was impress with how “this model has spread, making small, under-resourced rural schools effective in many Latin American nations.”

A typical Escuela Nueva classroom, featuring students of two grade levels sitting in group desks and actively working through their lessons. (Credit: Jared Wade)

The Escuela Nueva Methodology

Escuela Nueva is a learning methodology. In scholarly circles, it would be referred to as a pedagogy, and the method is based upon several core principles that have elevated it into a global standard of excellence.

At its best, Escuela Nueva aims to instill values — responsibility, tolerance, discipline, community — as much as academics. Due to the small class sizes and multi-grade classrooms (known as “multigrados” in Colombia) common in rural areas, there are always a few students who finish their lessons first and a few that lag behind.

This is common the world over, and Escuela Nueva confronts this fact with a collaborative approach. It promotes teamwork through ongoing open dialogue and hexagonal worktables that force children to face one another. The design encourages the quick-finishers to assist their peers. In this way, normal human social dynamics allow for leaders to develop and students to view collective problem solving as the default way to complete a task.

Vicky Colbert, during a recent interview in her humble Bogotá office, said she believes the benefits of this approach are even more pronounced in the modern era. Almost all professions require people to work together on projects with people from different backgrounds, different intelligence levels, and different disciplines. The Escuela Nueva style sets children up to operate this way from a very early age. And she says these are the skills useful in the workplaces of today — not being able to retain information dictated in long lectures, memorize book facts, and prove yourself once every two months on an end-all-be-all test that will define success or failure.

Tests are of course a part of the Escuela Nueva methodology. It is not some new-age alternative learning experience. And the curriculum is not revolutionary. The signature workbooks contain the same information and exercises expected in any elementary school lesson plan. Perhaps more than almost anything, these simple workbooks are critical to Escuela Nueva’s success.


The Escuela Nueva workbooks have been essential for helping the program scale to 20,000 rural schools and promoting student-centered learning in the classroom. (Credit: Jared Wade)

Colbert initially created the workbooks as a rudimentary how-to guide for teachers but they have changed over the years — with the help of government planners — to serve as a functional roadmap that can walk children through their entire academic year. “She has transformed conventional, teacher-centered schooling practices to a new learner-centered model,” said Gordon of the Yidan Prize judging panel.

Teachers don’t just sit back and watch the students fill in the books, however. They explore the materials together and discuss the themes in a way that resembles a conversation more than a series of instructions. “I think the real role of a teacher,” said Colbert, “is to be a good coach, to stimulate your students, to know their strengths, to know their weaknesses. It’s not to spend so much time giving information. Information comes packaged in so many other ways now.”

From her office in Bogotá, which is cluttered with medals, international prizes, and photos of Colbert alongside the likes of Bill Clinton and Pope John Paul II, she continued to stress the essential importance of this concept. “We’re going from the transmission of knowledge to the social construction of knowledge,” she said. “So it’s promoting more child-centered learning, personalized learning. Not everybody learns the same thing at the same time. There are different learning rhythms. You construct knowledge together through dialogue and interaction, but you have to have instruments and strategies to do it right. So, if you do child-centered education without having materials or mechanisms, it’s just theory.”

For all its good ideas — and even despite its name — Colbert admits that Escuela Nueva is nothing new. When it comes to theory, it is mostly still just a means of teaching young people the same type of knowledge that kids have been learning for the past century all over the world.

“I’m not an inventor starting an idea,” she said, citing the pioneering efforts of Dr. Maria Montessori, John Dewey, and Lev Vygotsky. “I had to build on what already existed…We know the theory — but the theory only comes to the elite schools in our regions, not the poorest of the poor schools.”

At her core, Colbert is a pragmatist. She is enthusiastic about the high-minded values and community-based aspects of Escuela Nueva, but ultimately describes it simply as a “proven solution to improve quality education.”

Since the beginning, Colbert had her eye on creating something that would remain viable in three ways: technically, politically, and financially. Technically meant that it must be easy to implement and teach. Financially meant it couldn’t be too expensive. And politically meant navigating labor union issues and surviving the whims of the election cycle.

“Anything we did, we could do in the 34,000 rural schools in Colombia,” said Colbert. More than even the methods themselves, impact and scale were the foundation of Escuela Nueva. “From the outset, we wanted to influence national policy — not to have just a nice little project.”

Beryl Levinger, who says elements of the educational principles she helped craft decades ago in Colombia alongside Colbert are still in use at Middlebury College in the United States, credits the Fundacion Escuela Nueva fonder for always remaining focused on this vision. “We created a pedagogy,” Levinger said in an interview with Middlebury. “But it was Vicky who became a vocal advocate for this methodology and transformed it into a worldwide movement.”


Two young students enjoy some recess time during their school day at Sede Barragán, a rural school in Quindio where four teachers lead Escuela Nueva lessons for around 80 kids across six grade levels. (Credit: Jared Wade)

A Good Idea Becomes National Policy

As someone who started out as a sociologist, and earned a master’s degree from Stanford University, Vicky Colbert has always seen the educational journey as more than just a personal achievement. To her, it underpins everything. “Without quality, basic education, you cannot achieve anything,” said Colbert. “You cannot achieve social, economic, or cultural development — nor peace nor democracy. So we need quality, basic education. I’m totally convinced of that. Without quality, basic education it would be very difficult for a country to reach other goals.” 5

In the 1970s, public education in even the largest cities in Colombia was lacking. But she was more concerned about the rural areas that in many cases barely had functional classrooms. There was no guarantee of universal basic education from the government, and in the schools that were managing to operate, one teacher was likely overseeing dozens of children ranging from five to 13 years old. Nobody was doing anything about this deficiency. “There were many schools that were invisible to educational planners,” she said.

Fixing these issues was the genesis of Escuela Nueva, and something she realized she could do better outside of government than in the first role she held for a short time in the Colombian Ministry of Education. Colbert began developing the core principles along with a Colombian teacher named Óscar Mogollón and Beryl Levinger, who initially came to Colombia as a U.S. Peace Corps volunteer and development worker before later becoming an international studies professor at Middlebury College.

Together, they started building on what already existed and trying to forge a consensus among different stakeholders in the country. “It wasn’t easy,’ said Colbert, but they eventually found funding for a pilot project in the three Andean regions of Cundinamarca, Boyacá, and Norte de Santander.

The results started to impress the decision-makers in Bogotá. In addition to performance score improvement, dropout rates fell and fewer kids were being held back to repeat grades. In time, the progress was undeniable, and the Escuela Nueva method became the national policy for rural education in all of Colombia. It was instituted into some 20,000 schools, and this monumental achievement created the momentum that took Escuela Nueva beyond the country’s borders.

It gained international acclaim after the World Bank, which had earlier provided a loan to help the program flourish in Colombia, in 1989 named Escuela Nueva as a global standard of successful educational innovation. The early indicators highlighted great potential and only looked better as time went on. One fact Colbert recites proudly is that, according to a 1998 study from the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), Colombia had risen to rank second, behind Cuba, in Latin America in terms of providing the best primary education to rural students. The study also showed that Colombia was a global outlier by having the bulk of its rural schools outperforming its urban schools.

As the word got out, countries from throughout the region — Brazil, Peru, Chile, Guatemala, and more — started sending representatives to Colombia to see what everyone was raving about. More than a dozen nations would eventually adopt the methods to some degree. International organizations kept arriving as well, including more World Bank agencies, UNESCO, UNICEF, and USAID.

Colbert would become vice minister of education of Colombia in the early 1980s, which helped to further embed Escuela Nueva into the fabric of the nation. She would also work in a high-level leadership role in the region for UNESCO. But eventually she wanted to be home overseeing her life’s work because the climate of the country was changing.

Even more than the previous decade, the 1980s were a chaotic time in Colombia. Just as the rapid rise of the drug trade hit, there was also an increased push for decentralized government. With the nation becoming torn apart and local politics beginning to assert more influence, the nascent Foundation Escuela Nueva needed to retain the confidence of federal bureaucrats in Bogotá but also launch efforts to win over thousands of local mayors and officials. “It started becoming debilitated in some regions,” she said, “and stronger in others…I wanted to get back into the picture in Colombia, and not let Escuela Nueva fade.”

There was so much to be done and she believed her program was on the cusp of making even greater impact — just when war-torn Colombia needed it most. “We wanted to continue innovating,” she said. “We want to adapt it to new contexts and populations. We want to adapt it to the urban areas also. We want to adapt it for displaced children caused by our conflict.”


Isabela Blandon Bravo, the 11-year-old class president of Sede Barragán. Here, as at all Escuela Nueva schools, student government is considered fundamental to instilling leadership and autonomy in young students. (Credit: Jared Wade)

Escuela Nueva in the Real World

This focus on scalability — led by one individual’s tenacity — is what allowed Escuela Nueva to develop into a global model of success. The classroom style and underlying educational principles, however, are what most kids adore. Test scores and student retention rates in a spreadsheet can impress bureaucrats. But nothing that can match the smile on a proud child’s face.

There are plenty of teeth showing in an Escuela Nueva classroom, where accountability means students are in charge of keeping attendance. Rather than the teacher calling out names, the kids personally mark the calendar each morning when they arrive. If they miss a day, they get a note from their parents explaining the absence and put it in the “excuse” box.

A large priority is placed on student government. The children elect a president, vice president, secretary, and treasurer. Kids from the lower grades are encouraged to begin participating early and enthusiastically. The schools also set up “work committees” that can include categories like sports and recreation, the environment, and even cleaning. Each group consists of a few representatives who plan events and activities. From “peace week” and kite festivals to science fairs and tree-planting days, organizing the committee agenda aims to instill values and give more students a leadership role in the classroom community.

Ethics and respect for the community become more than platitudes. The children embrace these core values. The classroom aims to instill citizenship — not merely scholarship.

All of this is on display at a small school in Quindio, the nation’s smallest department (which is the equivalent of a state or province). Quindio has become an iconic symbol of Colombian coffee country, a gorgeous green and slope-filled Andean mountain region that has managed to largely sidestep the worst damage of the armed conflict. Though tourists now flock to the working coffee town of Salento to see how beans are harvested, Quindio remains sparsely developed apart from one modern highway that runs through the region. The bulk of the families living here are poor and subsist as campesinos, working land they don’t own to carve out a meager living.

According to the local government, 208 schools in Quindio employ the Escuela Nueva method, and the Yidan Prize organizers arranged a press visit there to show reporters two of these locations. One is called Sede Barragán, a school of around 80 kids located about 40 minutes outside the departmental capital of Armenia. Sitting among towering mountain peaks, multiple rivers, and tropical fruit farms, the building itself is modest, but colorful and designed in the style of the vibrant red, blue, and yellow structures typical in Salento.




Sede Barragán is small and, like many rural Colombian schools, lacks resources. But the students take great pride in their school, which features the colors and design typical of buildings throughout coffee country. (Credit: Jared Wade)

Isabela Blandon Bravo, an 11-year-old, is the class president of Sede Barrangán. She formerly went to school in Medellín and misses some things about the urban setting but has adjusted to rural life. She has become a leader who her classmates look up to, and Isabela’s dream is to become a doctor. She thinks she might like to practice medicine in another country one day. France currently stands as her top pick.

While she may never make it to Paris, she will soon be moving on. This school ends at sixth grade, so she will be transferring to a different location, probably one of the larger schools in Armenia that doesn’t use the same teaching methods. But even though Isabela will have to adapt, Alva Lucia Orozco, the school’s head teacher, expects her to thrive in any environment.

Orozco has seen the difference first hand. While she is now among Escuela Nueva’s biggest evangelists, she has been teaching at the same location for four decades — long before the methodology came to Sede Barragán. “I am a part of the furniture,” said Orozco. In her view, the kids who leave this building now are much better prepared for the real world than those who she taught in traditional ways.

Vicky Colbert explains it plainly. “The most important part is people working in teams,” said Colbert. “I think that’s one of the most outstanding 21st Century skills. So what we started 40 years ago, now it’s the type of education everybody wants.”

Orozco’s first job is teaching students, but she also instructs the school’s other teachers on how to adapt to the Escuela Nueva style. “We’ve learned that teachers learn better from other teachers,” she said. Going over educational philosophy is key, and she has watched her colleagues, including Gloria Morena Zuluaga, grow more comfortable over time. Monthly meetings focus more on mentorship and open discussion more than detailed course planning.

There is always some situation that needs to be fixed, and they work together, often with help from the students, to overcome obstacles. “Colombians are inventors,” said Zuluaga. “We have so many problems that we have to look for new solutions. Every time we see a problem, we see an answer.”

Zuluaga has worked at the school, teaching all subjects to the second and third graders, for four and a half years. Though she now loves the learning style, at the beginning she was thrilled to start working at Sede Barragán for one reason: because it was a seven-minute drive from her house as opposed to the 45-minute motorbike ride she formerly endured to her previous school.

Many of the students also live in the nearby small town of Caicedonia. Though close, it lies across the departmental line in Valle de Cauca, a department in western Colombia that is much more plagued by drug-trade violence and conflict. But whether their home life is wonderful or trying, Zuluaga says that the attitudes she sees from students in her Escuela Nueva classroom stand apart from what she typically witnessed at her old school. “The kids are autonomous, and they are happy,” she said.

While Zuluaga had some experience in Escuela Nueva before transferring into Sede Barragán, many teachers who arrive in a new location know nothing about it. Most adjust. Some struggle. This is why in-the-field teacher training is such a core principle of a method that above all else relies on the instructor buy-in.

If the average teacher cannot understand the methodology and work within a student-centric guidebook environment, the kids will suffer. Because there are few options in a rural community. “We have to work with the teachers that are there,” said Colbert. “We cannot have a Ph.D. in the middle of the jungle.” 9

The nearby Escuela Nueva school Sede Cabaña is so small that kids from first through sixth grade all share a single classroom. (Credit: Jared Wade)


Escuela Nueva Embraces Urban Planning

Since the early days of Escuela Nueva, the rural population of Colombia has shrunk in terms of percentage of people living outside the cities. Decades of guerrilla conflict, paramilitary violence, and drug trafficking pushed so many people out of their villages and farming communities. Some found better lives in cities. Many others now live in slums and impoverished communities on the outskirts of Bogotá, Medellín, and Cali.

Along with the more than 260,000 people killed during Colombia’s half-century of conflict, at least 7.7 million have been displaced, according to the UN Refugee Agency. This is the second largest figure in the world, behind Syria (with 12.2 million). By comparison, there are 4.7 million displaced Afghans and 4.2 million displaced Iraqis.

Demographic restructuring hasn’t diminished rural need, however. In many ways, Colbert sees serving the students of Quindio — and areas with even lower population density, like the Amazon and Pacific jungle department of Chocó — as more important than ever. “Colombia has become urbanized, so there are not so many children [in rural areas],” she said. “But, still, these schools require special treatment.”

But Escuela Nueva has been expanding and evolving. Colbert has pushed to adapt the methodology for the city environment with Escuela Activa Urbana, which looks to bring similar change to the millions of students packed into Colombia’s sprawling urban metropolises. This has been part of the foundation’s work for decades but it is now taking on increasing importance.

Otoniel Morales Benjumea now works with the local education ministry but formerly served as the principal of Escuela Normal Superior del Quindio, a secondary school that has employed Escuela Nueva techniques in Armenia. Home to around 300,000 people, the Quindio capital is a small city by Colombian standards, but Morales said it brought positive changes to his former school, particularly among the most troubled kids.

He recalls one period when Normal Superior took in six students who had been kicked out of other educational institutions. Some of these “street kids” took to the program and began to excel. These type of adolescents may lack formal education and classroom discipline, but the group structure of Escuela Nueva can be comforting. They are accustomed to a fast-paced, sensory-rich environment.

Lectures and memorization challenges bore them and add to the inferiority they feel in a formal academic world. But interactive, communal learning lets them display their interpersonal smarts and mental dexterity — to the teacher and, more importantly, to themselves. This fosters curiosity, said Morales, and a willingness to explore potentially uncomfortable workbook lessons.

Such experience taught him to stop looking at the arrival of a troubled kid as a new problem to manage. Instead, he began to view it as an opportunity to reach someone who had fallen through the traditional system. “We want to change the world with this project,” said Morales.


Vicky Colbert believes that Escuela Nueva never could have become such a success without great teachers like Gloria Morena Zuluaga of Sede Barragán. (Credit: Jared Wade)

Escuela Nueva’s Global Future

The experiences of Quindio highlight why educators throughout the world are looking to adopt Nueva Escuela principles. Vicky Colbert lights up when recalling how her philosophy spread to locations like Guatemala and Brazil in its early days. More recently, she has traveled to Mexico, and talked extensively with the governments of Vietnam, Chile, and Zambia, where technical assistance has been offered to set up a program.

These high-level discussions are the backbone of kickstarting programs in new countries due to the same impact and scalability dynamics she encountered in Colombia in the 1970s. But Colbert now also focuses on partnering with other non-governmental organizations (NGOs) when moving into new areas.

There are multiple reasons that this has been a better approach than setting up a local Escuela Nueva outpost. First, it simply cuts down on overhead and resources. While it would be great to have the foundation’s boots on the ground across the globe, funding can be better spent elsewhere.

Second comes political risk. Ultimately, partnering with federal governments is the way to have the biggest impact. They are the only ones in a country that can install a nationwide rollout. But the downside is much greater — a lesson Colbert learned in Brazil after the public officials who championed the program left office. 

Brazil’s administration turnover, mass corruption scandals, and budgetary nightmares in recent years haven’t fully curtailed the foundation’s efforts in the country. At least 10,000 schools in the Portuguese-speaking country, under the name “Escola Ativa,” have used Escuela Nueva methods. But collaborating with established local NGOs and other private sectors stakeholders gives Colbert more confidence. They have staying power. And this helps ensure that the hard work spent laying the foundation for new programs won’t stall out with the changing winds of the next election.

In Mexico, Escuela Nueva now works with Fundación Azteca. In Zambia, it works with the Campaign for Female Education (Camfed). “In the case of Brazil, I should have had an organization from the private sector to work with, because innovations are very vulnerable to political and administrative changes,” said Colbert.

Despite such concerns, these days, the work is now more about expanding intelligently than fighting to break down roadblocks. After more than four decades of development, the challenge is no longer about convincing people that Escuela Nueva works. It’s about keeping up with demand.

This is why Colbert was overjoyed when she got the call about winning the Yidan Prize and the $3.9 million USD in funding that comes along with it. She hopes this can serve as something of a seed-round investment that attracts even more resources and partnerships — including more public support within Colombia — to kickstart a new, even-grander era for Fundación Escuela Nueva.

The interest is certainly there. Even the biggest country on earth wants to get involved. “There has been so much interest in China. So much interest,” she said. “I’ve been invited almost every year to go to China because they’re very interested in the Escuela Nueva model, especially for the rural areas.”

Though she has other priorities, Colbert says she has been flattered that even U.S. states, including California and New Mexico, have come calling to partner with the organization. “We want to work with the poorest of the poor children in developing countries,” said Colbert.

At an age when most are looking forward to retirement, Colbert shows no signs of slowing down. Even though the long journey has taken Escuela Nueva beyond the wildest dreams of the wide-eyed young woman who set off for Stanford University in the 1970s, there is still has so much work to be done.

Colbert is eager to continue the mission. And best of all, she is no longer alone. There is a growing group of supporters and educators, in Colombia and throughout the world, working toward the same goal. “This is my life project — and not only mine,” said Colbert. “But it’s a collective life project of many wonderful teachers that have been with me for so many, many years.”

Related

Vicky Colbert Wins Prestigious Yidan Prize for Lifelong Educational Work in Colombia, December 14, 2017

Share your thoughts: About the Author

Jared Wade is editor in chief of Finance Colombia. He is a Bogotá-based journalist with 15 years of experience covering topics including business, financial services, Latin America, and sports. Email him at jared.wade(at) financecolombia.com or follow him on Twitter at @Jared_Wade.

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