Around eight million students return to classrooms this week throughout Spain. Navarra has been the advance guard with the start of classes last Friday. Today the schools in Madrid and the Basque Country will follow and in the coming days students from the rest of Spain will return, starting tomorrow with Catalonia, Castilla-La Mancha, Aragón, Murcia, Cantabria and Ceuta. A new course begins marked by the insecurity felt by the families of the autonomous city after the avalanche of immigrants; due to the discomfort of teachers throughout Spain due to the insufficient response of the administration for centers that are increasingly diverse and complex in their multiculturalism, and due to the tug of war between the Government and the unions in the reform of the teaching career. Also characteristic of this new course is the fear of the autonomies of a worsening of academic results in the PISA report, the most famous educational study in the world, which the OECD will publish tomorrow, Tuesday.
This test, which evaluates the skills of 15-year-old students from 91 countries in Reading, Mathematics and Science (to which Foreign Language and Digital Competence are added in this call), will be a validation of the educational policy of the Government of Pedro Sánchez and the application of the Lomloe or Celaá Law by the autonomies (12 of them, with governments in which the PP is part).
In the previous edition, that of 2022, the Government blamed the fall in results - the worst in history in Sciences and Mathematics - on the closure of schools due to Covid. But this time he will have to assume his responsibilities due to a law that since 2020 has lowered the requirement by allowing, among other things, to pass the course and obtain the ESO degree without limits on failures. In addition, the age cohort evaluated for PISA 2025 has already studied for two years with the Lomloe curriculum, which promotes the reduction of concrete knowledge to prioritize attitudes and relegates memorization while encouraging practical applications.
Everything indicates that this model, added to the possible effect that the generalization of screens may have had on learning, has not contributed to raising our position in PISA, which in the last edition was already below the OECD average in Sciences, below the EU in Mathematics and below both in Reading. The regional governments consulted by this newspaper are uneasy because in June those in charge of PISA provided them with technical guidance with some embargoed information about their own territories. The communities are not authorized to disseminate the results before tomorrow at 9:30 a.m., but several of them have commented in a petit committee that they have not improved, without going into details.
"We are worried, our estimate is that there will be a general decline and that almost all autonomous communities will fall again, as will European countries, with some exceptions," say sources from an autonomy that has traditionally had good grades. The prognosis in other regional governments is similar and there is an atmosphere of "nervousness" and "concern", according to different sources, in the face of a new puncture in this test.
"A significant decline is expected in all communities and it seems that the OECD is not going to experience an upward rebound either," other educational sources point out. «The hypotheses that are used are two, compatible with each other. The first is that the closure of schools due to Covid has changed the way we see education and there are still some scars: it is likely that students have gaps because the programs to recover learning loss have not been effective. The second hypothesis is that a lower demand on students, not only in Spain but in other countries, caused by having left behind the traditional teaching of reading on paper, doing exercises and dictations and writing by hand, has contributed to worsening the results. This ease would have the aroma of Lomloe.
Of all the PISA territories, Spain is the country that has traditionally had a larger sample of students (around 30,000), because each of the 17 autonomies intervenes with an expanded representation of students. It is, therefore, one of those that pays the most to participate: the price paid by each autonomous community can be around 200,000 or 300,000 euros, which is added to a similar amount paid by the Ministry of Education. This indicates the importance that our country gives to the study, which has also acquired great social and media relevance because until now there has been no other state evaluation that allows a diagnosis of the system and comparison of the different territories.
All of this puts pressure on the autonomies, who do what they can to look as good as possible in the photo. The one that has gone the furthest has been Catalonia, excluded from this edition by the OECD for leaving 23% of the students out of the sample, precisely those with the worst performance, when the regulations do not allow an exemption rate of more than 5%.
Now we know that the Department of Education gave a talk to the directors of the centers to explain the type of students they could leave out of the exam: newcomers who did not master Catalan or those assessed by teachers as "with intellectual disabilities", a category that included not only those with physical and mental disabilities but also "emotional" ones, a concept ambiguous enough to exclude students of all types. What the counseling did not specify is that this exemption could not exceed 5%, so the directors removed all the students they considered.
The Ministry warned the Generalitat up to seven times, which did not correct the situation. Nor were the samples validated by Inspection, as has been done in previous editions. In exchange, the Government kept the ruling hidden for 15 months until this summer, just before the holidays, it made it known, initially blaming the directors of the centers. On August 31, he announced the dismissal of the number two in the Department and the opening of a file against three officials. The data from Catalonia will not appear in the international report, but it will appear in the Spanish report, along with a footnote indicating that they are not representative of reality. If they had sampled correctly, the data would be worse.
The Basque Country is another region that has also tried to obscure the data. It has reduced the sample size to a "minimum", when it has traditionally had the largest in all of Spain, which prevents it from being able to go into detail on some issues, such as the effects of language policy. In this edition, 56 schools with 2,310 students participated, according to the Public Sector Accounts of the Autonomous Community of Euskadi. This is almost half the number of centers and 35% fewer students compared to PISA 2022.
It so happens that Catalonia and the Basque Country are the autonomous communities that worsened the most in the last edition. In the case of the Basque Country, it made its own report in PISA 2022, but in the end it did not want to publish it. It also decided to no longer participate in the international PIRLS report after being the worst region in Spain in 2016. It is a more subtle statistical blackout than that of Catalonia, but it produces the same effect: the concealment of the failure of two educational systems where learning is carried out mainly in a language other than the one the student speaks at home. In a demographic context where there are more and more immigrants in classrooms who do not master the vehicular language, PISA represents a time bomb for the Administration.
Catalonia and the Basque Country have very alarmingly increased their percentages of 15-year-old students who do not achieve the minimum skills to function in life, while at the same time they have reduced their rate of brilliant students. It is something that has also happened in most regions and countries (except in Asia). Finland, the paradigm of good educational work at the origins of PISA, back at the beginning of the century, has gone from having 8% of low-performing students in 2009 to 29% in 2022, while outstanding Finnish students have fallen from 22% to 9% in this time, according to philosopher and pedagogue Gregorio Luri, who explains that this problem is also occurring in Spain: "One in four Spanish students is in the two lower bands of PISA 2022, which means that they do not have the minimum skills, and this is a disaster. The general trend of the majority of autonomous communities has been to increase the number of low-performing students while high-performing students decreased.
