The Via Augusta effect

We talk a lot about the educational crisis and we list issues that fuel it. Examples of this are the PISA results, the open conflict with the unions, the weariness of the teaching staff, the difficulties in tackling inclusive education, and the new training dynamics in classrooms that are not like those of the past. To complicate matters even further, Wolfgang Streeck recently recalled that what we call a "polycrisis" is a bundle of chained crises (housing, infrastructure, aging, inequality, government debt, anxiety about the future) that reinforce each other while states have less and less fiscal room and wages do not rise. School is not an island. It is the place where all these crises arrive every morning, with names and surnames, at nine o'clock sharp.

The educational problem is, therefore, a problem within a set of issues that are difficult to disentangle and which not only grow in volume, but, as a mixture, make it increasingly difficult to find a solution in a differentiated way. The term complexity, which we often use to say that everything is becoming more complicated, arises from this intersection, and complexity has a requirement that we often forget. The more complex a situation is, the more proximity is needed to know where to start and how to do it. Access to extracurricular activities, segregation, diversity of origins, housing precariousness, adolescent mental health, or the impact of screens do not present themselves the same way in Nou Barris as in Sant Cugat, or in L'Hospitalet as in Pallars.

However, the Catalan educational system functions as if everything were homogeneous. Like many public policies in Catalonia, it is strongly centralized, but in education, the phenomenon is more relevant. Everything ends up passing through the department located on Via Augusta in Barcelona. From there, the payrolls of tens of thousands of teachers are paid and leaves are decided, and procedures and personnel movements are processed. Territorial services do not have their own competencies, the result of a logic of deconcentration rather than decentralization. Windows in the territory. And neither do the town councils, beyond nurseries, have much to say. It is what some call the "Via Augusta effect." A decision-making center overwhelmed by daily management, too far away to know and too busy to think. Treating unequal realities the same does not generate equality; rather, it aggravates it. It is surely not the department's most important priority right now, but it is equally significant.

There are experiences that show that another logic is possible. Some have formal recognition and their own competencies, such as the exception of the Barcelona Education Consortium, where the Generalitat and the City Council share power, which allows for the combination of common criteria with greater knowledge of the territory. Others, without this recognition, have managed to open up space in an apparently homogeneous system and boast, with reason, of being educating cities. Municipalities such as El Prat de Llobregat or Granollers, among others, have built their own city educational projects, connecting school, social services, culture, and the territorial environment, just as has been done in the Barcelona Neighborhood Plan. Educational zones, provided for in the law but deployed very unevenly, point in this direction, generating spaces where centers, city councils, and services share diagnosis and resources. They are scattered pieces of an architecture that is not yet solid.

It is not about choosing between centralizing or decentralizing, but rather deciding what corresponds to each scale. Decentralization has risks such as the fragmentation of objectives, inequalities between territories, capture by those who have more resources and greater capacity for pressure, and, above all, the low capacity of many municipalities that are too small to assume more functions. On the other hand, without redistributive mechanisms, what is called the "Matthew effect" emerges, that is, with more autonomy, to those who have more, more will be given. Therefore, a center is needed to do what only the general vision can do, that is, set shared objectives, guarantee sufficient resources, and redistribute them where they are most needed, having good data and information systems to evaluate and correct. To know without complicating the lives of those who are nearby. At the proximity scale, it would be necessary to strengthen educational zones and generate pilot experiences with local consortia with those city councils willing to assume educational responsibilities so important for the territories. With formal recognition and real municipal presence, everything that requires speed and close knowledge should go there to ensure concrete responses to problems that are different in each place.

Paradoxically, decentralizing management does not mean eroding the governing capacity of the whole. A department freed from daily processing could do what it currently cannot do, such as anticipating, making strategic decisions, and ensuring the equity of the whole. The educational crisis may be the occasion to propose it. If we respond to it only with more resources managed in the same way, we will do the same thing again expecting different results.