The Socialists and United for Progress group has requested the urgent appearance of the president of the Superior Evaluation Council, Carles Vega, in Parliament to explain the results of the PISA report and assess the quality of the Catalan education system.
Vega is currently the subject of criticism after councilor Anna Simó revealed that she was responsible for stating that the PISA sample was wrong due to an over-representation of immigrant students when the same council had validated the social composition of the sample before tests.
Following the PISA results, on December 5, the spokesperson for the Socialists in the commission, Esther Niubó, urgently requested Vega’s appearance, recalling that it is not the first time that he has been requested and has not responded.
Thus, in September 2022 his presence was requested to assess the disastrous basic skills of that year. The commission approved it on October 4 “without it having yet been substantiated.”
The error of the council, which had the results on Catalonia weeks in advance of the world presentation, led the secretary of Educational Transformation, Ignasi García Plata, to interpret at the press conference on December 5 that the poor results were due, in part, to a failure of the sample since the body that coordinates the PISA tests at the national level had estimated a 24% representation when the department’s data pointed to 14.9%. At this press conference, the absence of the president of the council drew attention.
The next day, Education had to rectify it, ensuring that the sample was correct. Before this statement, President Pere Aragonès wanted to put an end to the possible controversy with the veracity of the data with a “no excuses” on his account on the social network X.
“There was an error, an unforgivable error,” the minister told the newspaper Ara today. “The council believed there was a problem with the sample and it was a mistake,” she says. “Pisa does not define recently arrived students in the same way that the department does,” he continues, “we count students who come from outside, not their families,” he explained in relation to the second generation of immigrants who do enter the definition of PISA.
The counselor explained yesterday at the press conference about the department’s actions regarding these data that the evaluation council would become an Evaluation and Prospecting Agency, with a different structure. A larger body, independent of the department. This agency is planned in the LEC and already in July it announced that it would be created in 2024.
This will take place, he said, in January, although it will not be until July 2024 that the decree will be published.
Carles Vega was named by Josep Gonzàlez-Cambray president of the Superior Evaluation Council on September 13, 2021, replacing Joan Mateo, who had been in the position during the convergent and ERC legislatures, with Josep Bargalló. Vega had been director of Lleida’s Territorial Services of Education and coordinator of the Catalan Education Service – SEDEC (1992-2003).
