Education: uniformity is a dangerous path
In his speech at the Maritime Museum on September 14, President Illa showed himself to be well aware of the distance between the reality of Catalan education and the ideals that have inspired it. But he does not resign himself and tells us: "We must bring Catalan education to excellence". I agree with him.
We can have a will for excellence and we can increase resources. But that will not be enough: we must also design improvements from now on that are possible and significant. And here is the difficulty: what are they?
Of the great challenges that burn us, that of education is, in my opinion, the most difficult. In housing, we are slow to reform regulatory frameworks, but it will eventually be done. In Rodalies, action is being taken, and a perceptible improvement in the medium term is very likely. Health and education are different: the human factor dominates there, since one must know how to effectively align the efforts of public workers. The health system functions with a quality that must be preserved. On the other hand, the educational system does not work and needs to be reformed. How?
The PISA blunder illustrates the bad situation. It has also given us information we did not have. It is dramatic, but not surprising, that epidemic and demographic shocks mean that 20% of students fall far behind. But what about the remaining 80%? The PISA results for the censored sample are now known. It is not a great disaster, but we cannot conclude that our problem is only with the 20%. It would be natural for the censored sample to put us ahead of the non-censored ones in the rest of Spain. It does, but with an exception that stings: in mathematics, our censored one remains, even so, below the non-censored one in Madrid.
For the 25-26 academic year, the Catalan public education system has had 81,158 teachers (29,047 in the semi-private sector), as many—and as diverse—as the population of Manresa. In education, teachers are everything and, therefore, their sheer volume means that recovery cannot come solely from improvements in initial selection, but must also involve knowing how to leverage the skills and capabilities of those we already have. In such a large group, there are many who are passionate about reading or mathematics. We must give them the opportunity to pass that passion on to their students. But we will only achieve this if we break the homogenizing spirit that has dominated educational policy and open the door—as recommended by the OECD—for schools to have a degree of autonomy and be able to generate their own accents. Uniformizing dirigisme does not allow for this (what has become of the splendid mathematical tradition of the Vicens Vives school in Girona?). We cannot afford to make a mistake with another uniform reform. It would be too costly. At the very least, it would be advisable for the dirigisme to include the practice of pilot projects, but it would be much better—as it is in Estonia, a PISA winner—if, from among the 81,158, we selected those most capable of being principals and allowed them to develop a stable core of teachers and their own model within a broad regulatory framework. We will then be able to see which pedagogical shifts that sprout from the ground up yield the best results.
An education system that strives for excellence must have two objectives: a good average level—which is what PISA measures—and the guarantee that all students can fully deploy their specific capabilities. An indirect indicator of how we are doing in the second objective is provided by the results in the International Mathematical Olympiad for high school students. In Spain, we do not stand out in this, and I must note that the number of students from Catalan schools who have qualified for the Spanish team (of six members) has gone from four in 2023 to zero in the last three years. Excellence in the average and at the top do not necessarily go together (Estonia does not stand out in the Olympiad; Romania does, but is below us in PISA). But they can go together, and a good example for Spain is Poland: a lower per capita income than Spain's, higher PISA scores, and one of the best European performances in the Olympiads. The average position of Poland in the last five competitions is 17th in the world, while Spain's is 47th.
In high school (or intermediate vocational training), facilitating students to fully develop their capabilities requires either specialized schools (accepted in sports or music, but not in science; in Poland there are some) or schools large enough to offer all students an advanced course in the disciplines for which they have a vocation and aptitude. Or combinations of both.
