Coz in Socialist Andalusia, we all have to be equal [ly poor, that is].
See, Madrid bought out a new law which aimed to shake up the educational system in Spain, which is run and organised by the regions. One of the changes was to allow the ranking of schools by performance, and within schools, ranking of students and teachers, so that bright students could, in theory, be fast tracked, and bad teachers sidelined (you can´t fire a teacher!)
Andalusia doesn´t like this idea, and today rushed out a new law ordering that no rankings be compiled. “We value equality before difference” said the Junta. “Against this new tendency to rank, Andalusia has bet on an education model which is exclusively orientated towards teaching and equality”.
Right. Because you wouldn’t want the citizens to see in a spreadsheet just how bloody useless your schools actually are, would you?
policy of equality of opportunity – good
policy of equality of outcome = lower competence
policy of redistribution – as a safety net, good
Junta de Andalucia – incompetent except at looking after themselves
David, do you have a link to the policy document to hand?
League tables for schools are not always a good thing. We need to ask why Madrid wants it. League tables are often much less about transparency and much more about pushing schools towards a restricted, rigid and standardised curriculum by the back door. This move needs to be seen in light of the central PP wanting to bring education in general (and humanities in particular) under increasingly more direct rule from Madrid. League tables pressure schools to teach students to pass standardised tests in order to push themselves up the table, and thus teaching closely what central government dictates goes into the metrics of those tables.
In addition, grading teachers and schools is a very blatent prelude to introducing what one might euphemistically call “performance related pay/funding”, which is a nice way of cutting funding to “undesirable” schools, and undermining collective pay agreements for teaching staff – classic divide-and-rule. Schools and teachers in the poorest areas always come off worst from league tables, and I’ll leave it to other readers to deduce who would come out on top.
The Junta no doubt has their own reasons for rejecting tables, but that doesn’t mean rejecting them isn’t the right thing to do for other reasons.
It’s called the Decreto de Evaluación del Sistema Educativo, Google it.
The trouble is that:
A) Teachers in Spain are funcionarios, gold plated civil servants that can’t be fired without a judicial order.
and B)
The Junta starts off by assuming all schools are equal, and the only trouble is due to individual learning difficulties. It proposes that schools should “auto evaluate” to identify problems and propose corrective measures. Yeah, right. It can’t be the fault of the teachers (because you can’t fire them, or send them for more training or even move them from centre to centre once they’re in), and it’s not the fault of the administrators of the schools, because that’s a combination of the flawless teachers and parents.