The Catalan PISA fiasco is not just a statistical error. It is an educational paradox. When almost one in every four selected students is left out of a test that is supposed to portray the system, the problem is not only that the sample ceases to be reliable. The problem is what this exclusion reveals about our way of understanding inclusion.An inclusive school cannot demonstrate its inclusion by excluding from evaluation the students who most reveal their limits.Catalonia has participated in PISA for years, and the Administration was aware of the criteria, the procedure, and the importance of preserving the representativeness of the sample. It is not enough to talk about a confusion: it must be explained why no control mechanism stopped a deviation of this magnitude. There are, of course, exceptional cases where a student cannot take a test like PISA under valid conditions. But when the exception extends to leaving out almost a quarter of the sample, we are no longer just talking about a technical problem. We are talking about a diagnosis that has ceased to represent the classrooms it intended to evaluate.Students with cognitive, emotional, behavioral, or linguistic difficulties are not an anomaly of the system. They are the system. We cannot consider them fully included if they stop being counted when we evaluate what the school achieves. A common confusion arises here: confusing inclusion with protection. Protecting a student from a situation they truly cannot face may be necessary. But interpreting difficulties too broadly as a reason not to assess them is another matter. It may seem compassionate, but it can lower expectations and avoid the more uncomfortable question: what has this student learned and what has the system failed to offer them? Stopping the questions is not inclusion. What is not evaluated does not disappear. It simply stops engaging us. If the most vulnerable students are left out of the sample, the picture may be more comfortable, but it is less honest. It no longer explains what the school is doing with the student body as a whole, but only with those we have considered more easily assessable.

A teacher today doesn't just teach. They guide. Tell. Detect. Mediate. Motivate. Manage. Fill out reports. Attend to families. Apply protocols. Adapt to increasingly complex realities. And, amidst all this, they still try to teach.For a long time now, the school has ceased to be solely an institution of instruction. Progressively, it has been assigned social, emotional, and compensatory functions that were previously distributed in other spheres. It is not difficult to understand why: faced with growing social problems, the school is often the last space where there are still adults, time, and a certain structure. In this regard, the announcement of the deployment of police officers in some educational centers is not just a matter of security, but also an indicator of the extent to which the school is assuming functions that go beyond learning. The question is not whether this is legitimate. It probably is. The question is what happens when the school has to do everything.Meanwhile, teacher unrest is growing and public debate tends to read it exclusively in labor terms: salaries, hours, ratios, stability. All of this is important, but perhaps it is insufficient. Because perhaps the problem is not just how much teachers work or earn: perhaps the problem is what we ask them to be.When a profession loses clarity in its role, when its functions expand without clear limits, when responsibilities grow but authority and resources do not keep pace, the result is not just overload: it is a deeper sense of exposure, of unprotectedness, of not having a stable framework from which to operate. Perhaps we have turned the school into the place where all the problems that society does not know or does not want to solve in other areas are managed. And when everything is resolved at school – learning, inclusion, well-being, coexistence, social compensation –, the risk is that the institution loses its center.In classrooms, this translates into constant tension. The teacher is expected to be many things at once, without these functions being well-defined or coordinated. What was once a profession with a clear mission –teaching– becomes a diffuse function, where everything is a priority and, therefore, nothing is entirely so.In this context, the debate often shifts towards teacher training. If the results are not good or the system does not respond, there is a tendency to look at the teacher: they need to be trained more, innovate more, adapt more. But this perspective, although necessary, once again puts the focus on individuals and not on the system. Because there is another, more uncomfortable question: to what extent is the system designed to make viable what it asks for?Perhaps teacher discontent is not an anomaly, but a clue. A clue that indicates that there is something in the way we have redefined school that does not quite fit. And perhaps, before continuing to add new functions to it, we should ask ourselves one more question: what can a school really do... and what can't.

Every so often, the educational debate returns to the same point: the increase in conflicts in schools and the growing sense of vulnerability among teachers. The latest study by the Spanish teachers' union STEs-I, which found that 83% of teachers perceive an increase in verbal and physical aggression from students, has revived a familiar narrative: that of the school as a space in permanent crisis.