The Minister of Education, Esther Niubó, is appearing this afternoon in Parliament to explain the Generalitat's incredible failure to organize the PISA tests. As we know, the story could not be more lamentable, no matter how you look at it: the OECD warned in March. No information was given until July, until a Friday at the end of July, to be exact, when they sent a director general to face the music and not the minister, and they describe an error in the sample of students examined, which far exceeds any explainable decimal error, as a specific and technical problem.As we explain today, the alteration of the PISA sample in Catalonia far exceeds that of any country in the latest report. It reminded me of the day when the Generalitat, under the presidency of Pere Aragonès, did not know how to correctly convene a competitive examination. With the difference that this PISA issue is an international embarrassment. And I prefer to believe it was a (serious) fiasco rather than have to think it's a way to circumvent results that will be poor given the problems that have been affecting Education in Catalonia for years. It is enough to remember that we finished the course amidst strikes and we will start it the same way. The problem with Education is in the classrooms, which are a reflection of all of society's problems, in the training of teachers, in the authority of principals, in the tension of an inclusive school that lacks the means to be worthy of the name, in a Catalonia that has been getting poorer, etc. But something is happening in the Department of Education and, by extension, in the Government, when it signs a union pact that inflames the unions, closes an agreement with the OECD to improve teaching, and, one year later, makes a big mistake in the sample for the PISA tests. And in another order of indignation, we have the multitudinous demonstration yesterday in Palma de Mallorca against the excess of tourism that has led the island, like the rest of the Balearic Islands, to collapse. There is no need for many explanations as to why the protest, because in Catalonia we know well what tourist collapse is, which affects ecology, mobility, housing, culture, language, etc. The manifesto of the call has a quite explicit paragraph on the effect of tourism: “It invaded our coasts, then our towns and our cities and is currently occupying our homes. Mallorca cannot fit any more hotels, cannot fit any more coffee franchises, fast food or cheesecakes, and cannot fit any more tourists! Mallorca at its limit! Less tourism, more life!” Such a demonstration is a sign that must be listened to and attended to with urgency. But everything suggests that it will not be so, for now, because the Balearic government and tourist interests are one. The proof is what happened in the end:

Bertrand Richet is a leading expert in School evaluation council, The French School Assessment Council. He was the Inspector General of the French Ministry of Education for almost a decade. His main task on the assessment council has been to design the new framework for evaluating schools and institutes. He is visiting Catalonia at the invitation of the Catalan Government through an Erasmus+ grant.

"I collapsed trying to do Innovamat problems with my daughter"; "Innovamat makes difficult what used to be easy"; "Students haven't grasped basic concepts and get overwhelmed with addition." These are just some of the thousands of comments made on social media since the publisher's materials were released in 2017. Innovamat began to land in the mathematics classrooms of CataloniaNow, eight years later, the Catalan company's methods are used in more than 800 schools and institutes in Catalonia—approximately a third of the centers—reaching almost 200,000 students in primary and secondary education. The growth of the mathematics teaching publisher has not been limited to Catalonia; it has also reached 2,600 educational centers in nine different countries, exceeding half a million students worldwide. Furthermore, in recent days Innovamat has entered the United States and has become one of fifteen publishers—Innovamat is the only one not based in the US—authorized by the California government for use in classrooms in that state's schools and institutes.