Has education hit rock bottom in Catalonia?

The data re­lat­ing to Cat­alo­nia pub­lished in the lat­est PISA re­port have gen­er­ated great con­tro­versy and at the same time great con­cern about the ed­u­ca­tion sys­tem in our coun­try. Po­lit­i­cal and media dis­putes aside, it is im­por­tant to analyse the evo­lu­tion of re­cent years and lis­ten to the voices of ex­perts, who can help us un­der­stand the pub­lished re­sults. Things never hap­pen sud­denly and by them­selves, and there are var­i­ous rea­sons with dif­fer­ent ori­gins. Plac­ing the re­spon­si­bil­ity only on one part of the prob­lem (teach­ers, fam­i­lies, stu­dents) is ab­surd and leads to com­pletely wrong con­clu­sions. Spe­cial­ists must study the ef­fect of dif­fer­ent changes that have oc­curred in the coun­try over re­cent years: the change in the com­po­si­tion of the pop­u­la­tion, the change in the school man­age­ment model, the in­flu­ence of cer­tain ped­a­gog­i­cal cur­rents, the im­pact of tech­nol­ogy... It is only in con­sid­er­a­tion of all avail­able data on these fac­tors that the in­di­ca­tors pro­vided by the PISA re­port can be put in con­text. Com­par­ing the aca­d­e­mic re­sults in Cat­alo­nia with areas with which we share sim­i­lar char­ac­ter­is­tics makes much more sense than com­par­ing them with coun­tries with which we have prac­ti­cally noth­ing in com­mon. Per­haps less alarmism and more con­cern is needed. Be­cause the prob­lem is not the im­pact of the head­lines from a spe­cific day that ed­u­ca­tion in Cat­alo­nia is re­gress­ing in skills and knowl­edge, but rather it has to do with iden­ti­fy­ing the real rea­sons that have brought us here. And cor­rect­ing them is not a mat­ter for an­other im­pact head­line in the media, nor im­me­di­ate ef­fect mea­sures; it has more to do with re­vers­ing the cur­rent trends. This is surely a task that will take years, and pos­si­bly as many years as it has taken for Cat­alo­nia to go from a lead­ing po­si­tion in ed­u­ca­tion down the rab­bit hole. Hope­fully this time the PISA re­port is a cat­a­lyst for doing things dif­fer­ently.

For fur­ther in­for­ma­tion, check out our in-depth fea­ture Ed­u­ca­tion in the spot­light on pages 10-16 of this month’s issue.