Bogotá's Education Crisis: How Decades of Underfunding and Policy U-Turns Brought Us Here

Bogotá’s public schools will open next month with a deficit of 1,200 teachers and a student-teacher ratio of 38-to-1 in some localidades, according to the District Education Secretary’s own operational report from June. That ratio is nearly double the OECD average of 21-to-1.

The numbers come as no surprise to anyone who has watched education policy in the capital over the past two decades. The current shortfall is not a sudden crisis. It is the predictable result of a series of funding formulas, court rulings, and political choices that have left the district’s school system structurally brittle.

How the Funding Formula Broke

The trouble started in 2001, when the national government introduced the General Participation System (SGP) to distribute education funds to regions. The formula tied money to student enrollment numbers, not to the actual cost of running schools. In Bogotá, where land prices in localities like Usme and Ciudad Bolívar have more than tripled since 2010, the per-student allocation never caught up with the cost of building and maintaining classrooms. By 2019, the city was spending 18 percent of its own budget on education, but the SGP covered only 43 percent of actual operating costs, according to a 2020 report from the Bogotá Comptroller’s Office.

Then came the pandemic. When schools closed in March 2020, the district scrambled to distribute 85,000 tablets and 40,000 SIM cards to students in Bosa and Suba. But the real damage was in the classroom: learning loss from two years of remote instruction has been estimated at the equivalent of a full academic year for students in the lowest socioeconomic strata, according to a 2023 study by the Universidad Nacional’s Education Faculty.

Since 2022, successive mayoral administrations have tried three different curriculum reform models. The first, under Claudia López, emphasized digital skills and English. The second, under Carlos Fernando Galán, pivoted to foundational literacy and math. The third-announced in April 2026-reintroduced arts and civic education but offered no new funding. Each change required teachers to retrain, textbooks to be reprinted, and classroom schedules to be reorganized. The district’s own evaluation unit found last year that 65 percent of teachers felt “not well prepared” to implement the latest curriculum.

The Teacher Pipeline and the Courtroom

The teacher shortage has its roots in a 2004 constitutional court ruling that made it harder to fire temporary teachers but also made hiring new permanent ones a bureaucratic ordeal. A 2022 decree attempted to fast-track hiring for 300 positions in Engativá and Kennedy, but the process took 18 months. Meanwhile, the average age of Bogotá’s public school teachers rose to 52. Retirements have outpaced hires every year since 2019.

At the same time, the city’s population of school-age children has grown faster than the national average. The district opened 8 new schools in 2023 and 2024, all in the southern periphery: two in San Cristóbal, one in Usme, two in Rafael Uribe Uribe, and three in Bosa. But census data from the National Administrative Department of Statistics (DANE) shows that the number of children aged 5-14 in Bogotá increased by 11 percent between 2018 and 2025, while classroom capacity rose just 4 percent.

What happens next is uncertain. The Galán administration has proposed a new local education tax on commercial property over 500 million pesos, but the city council has not scheduled a vote. Meanwhile, a new national law, passed in March 2026, requires all school districts to offer full-day schedules by 2028-a mandate that Bogotá’s infrastructure cannot currently meet. The Education Ministry in Bogotá, located on Avenida El Dorado, has said it will release a feasibility study before the end of July.

For parents enrolling children next month, the practical advice is simple: check if your local school has an open spot in the morning shift, since the afternoon shift already has waiting lists in more than half the city’s 20 localidades. The district’s online tool, Matrículas Bogotá, shows current availability by neighborhood. In places like Fontibón and Los Mártires, morning slots are full.