The objective of the OECD Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) is to measure the ability of 15-year-old students to use their knowledge and skills in reading, mathematics and science to meet life’s challenges. . In the latest edition of the report, Catalonia is one of the autonomous communities with the worst results: Catalan students in the 4th year of ESO have gone from being at the head of the academic ranking in Spain to, in a decade, experiencing a drop in level of understanding reading equivalent to two school years. Six experts –Jaume Funes, psychologist and educator; Marina Subirats, sociologist; Mònica Nadal, from the Bofill Foundation; Enric Prats, professor of Pedagogy (UB); Mar Hurtado, teacher and president of Rosa Sensat, and Oriol Blancher, president of the Catalan School Group – analyze the causes of these results and provide their point of view to reverse them.
The PISA report neither describes the reality of the institutes nor is it useful for thinking about how to improve it. It says how much math they know, but not how much they knew when they came to school. It doesn’t talk about how teachers go about selling knowledge in lives full of discomfort. It does not indicate how many hours the teacher has invested in convincing the student to learn. It does not serve to build the school that the inequality and diversity of the students of the digital society needs. Let’s give value to its indicators. But, it is surprising that we only do it with math and language. We also have the indicators of “Students’ school environment”.
Catalonia is, for example, the last when the students value life at the institute. A large majority of students consider that it is not “a place of well-being and learning.” Or the relationship with the teaching staff. In which we are also in line. We can think about the “academic” indicators, but we should give the same thought to the “school life” indicators. We would have to think again about the complexity of classrooms. Why do we forget that the first great challenge of today’s school is how to embrace the unfair inequality and the enormous diversity of adolescent lives?
The system prevents many good teachers from dedicating themselves to being meaningful opportunities in adolescent lives. We will have to answer the question of what we expect from teachers (subject to all our social contradictions) and make it possible for them to accompany adolescent lives by seducing them with the desire to know and the pleasure of learning.
There are two, in my view, the fundamental causes that explain the results of the PISA report. One of them is related to school education, the other is not. First and foremost: we have known for almost a century that cultural and economic inequality is the fundamental cause of school success or failure. According to data from mid-2023, child poverty continues to skyrocket in Catalonia: 375,500 children suffer from it, and 11.6% suffer from severe material deprivation. Can we expect great school results from girls and boys who are poorly subjected to essential deficiencies? Aristotle already warned us that it is unfair to treat unequal things equally. The school cannot work miracles and equalize a growing and brutal inequality. And there are other causes, linked to the educational system itself.
In 2000 I was Councilor for Education in Barcelona, ??and I found the vast majority of school libraries closed. A great effort was made to open and energize them; Twenty years later, they are closed again. What interest in reading can students have when their school’s library is closed? You learn to read by discovering the world that books give us; If the school does not value them, can we be surprised that they are not interested in reading? A few years ago, Catalonia experienced a renewing impulse in education, arising from teachers; It was not sufficiently supported, and teachers have had to fight for their rights, not for innovation. The causes of failures are obvious, new inventions are not needed for the necessary changes. Let it be done, without delay or fuss.
The current educational system is based on chronic underfunding, exacerbated by the 2010 cuts, which reduced the incipient educational plans, reduced policies to address diversity and suppressed training items, in addition to freezing teachers’ income. The quality of the system rested on the teaching teams, who responded to the growing challenges with high doses of commitment, voluntarism and resilience. A situation like this was already unsustainable, and the crisis experienced with Covid and its derivatives has ended up weakening the capacity of centers to respond to educational needs. To reverse this situation it is necessary to invest more and better.
Centers must be financed in a stable manner, according to the realities of their students and the environment. Identify the centers with the most difficulties and the students with the most needs for educational attention to provide (without bureaucracy) the teaching and non-teaching supports (social educators, educational psychologists, administrative staff) that guarantee that the teams can accompany the learning process. It is also necessary, with the collaboration of the local administration, to expand educational opportunities beyond school hours, with quality extracurricular activities, both inside and outside the school. In short, it is key to put all the available resources of the system (inspection, equipment, professionals) at the service of the essential task carried out by educational centers.
Knowing the causes and solutions of the results of the PISA report in Catalonia requires a calm analysis with a view that must go beyond school and institute. At stake is a complex social functioning that affects how current children and young people learn and what motivations they have; We cannot act in isolation from realities that condition the disposition of learners. From the outset, the results must be a help and not something that places blame; it is necessary to focus on where specific shortcomings are seen and act with more territorial data, understanding each context and each reality. I cannot conceive a PISA analysis without taking into account the high child poverty data, for example.
Acting and meeting essential needs, one does not learn if learning takes up the space of surviving. Perhaps we should praise learning, curb superficiality and improve in depth. Link knowledge to personal experiences, feel challenged by what you learn to give meaning to what you do. Surely more resources will help, but also optimize the ones we already have. Teacher training has a very important role, without recipes that solve decontextualized realities, that help interpret the curriculum that allows us to reflect on the same practice. Teachers must ask themselves more questions, what is the meaning of school and institute today? This should be a latent debate in all centers. Draw conclusions and agree on thoughts and, above all, recover social prestige. We need each other united.
Reading is no longer the center of the educational act: before digital, it was essential to access all knowledge. In any subject, reading proficiency was necessary; enough to understand them and, above all, what was asked for in an exam. Without reading, it was not approved. When reading is displaced by other sources of information (visual, digital, etc.), learning based on writing suffers. As for mathematics, they have lost weight as a subject. Proof of this is that it is not mandatory in university entrance tests. Furthermore, for decades we have had electronic devices that effectively replace the most basic calculations, causing us to pay more attention to the result than to the procedure. There is also a mismatch between educational objectives, methods to achieve them and conditions to carry them out, which are not the most appropriate. You can disagree with the objectives, but the issue is not there, but in their implementation and how their results are measured.
Evaluation determines the way of learning and the way of teaching. And an underlying factor is the general disaffection towards school. If the school does not provide anything new, it is no longer interesting. When everything is online, the importance of school disappears, also among the political class, which only changes when the drums sound. What can be done to reverse this situation? Confidence and conviction in school. We must stop with general solutions and put the magnifying glass: invest more, but better, where more deficits are detected. It is essential to encourage learning that is considered basic and, above all, that which is genuine to the school and will not be learned elsewhere. The school must find its place in this new digital system to meet the needs of each student with rigor and precision, thoroughly reviewing the evaluation systems and increasing the quality of teacher training, among other measures.
We can talk about at least three reasons that have led us to the current situation. Economic reasons: not enough has been invested, and the money that has been invested has been poorly targeted without achieving improvement results. Pedagogical reasons, innovative methodologies with little contrast, with a strong technological and little didactic component and with content often not designed for the current diversity of students. And sociological reasons: the massive incorporation of recently arrived students and, above all, the high percentage of economic vulnerability, generates a complexity in the system that has not been accompanied by the necessary organizational, economic or management measures. When the results are segregated between public and charter schools, the latter obtains PISA results above the European average.
What is done well in the concert? It has more stable and committed staff with their respective educational projects; they are solid and clearly contrasted educational projects, with leadership and management that optimizes resources. Many things can be done by the Administration to reverse these bad results. A great country pact is necessary (that is fulfilled, not like the LEC) where the financing of the educational service is clearly specified and what areas of improvement are necessary in the system. In addition, teacher training is a primary element, as well as hiring and selection policies. Improve the autonomy of the centers and, at the same time, create a system of serious educational audits in the centers to guarantee the optimization of resources, the quality of the projects and attention to the diversity of the students.
