Treading On Balearics' Educational Performance

It's not quite like the anticipation of waiting to hear who has won an Oscar or which countries England have drawn in the World Cup finals, but anticipation there was ahead of the announcement of this year's PISA (Programme for International Student Achievement) survey, published for the first time since 2009 by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. It might be said, however, that there was a similar sense of impending doom to that surrounding England's draw for those countries which knew full well that they were far from being seeded and were languishing in the educational international rankings league. Spain, unlike its football team which can look forward with optimism to the World Cup draw, was bracing itself for the worst. Though the Spanish media has suggested that the PISA results show a slight improvement in educational standards, the actual text of the PISA report says otherwise. Mean performance since 2003 remains below average in the key areas of mathematics, science and reading comprehension and is not improving. Indeed, the report suggests that despite improvements in student socioeconomic status since 2003 there is a negative trend in performance.

There has been, you might have noticed, a fair amount of recent interest in education both nationally in Spain and in the Balearics. The new national education bill was introduced and greeted with widespread criticism and protests. The introduction of the Balearic Government's trilingual teaching (TIL) programme has been an utter disaster and is likely to become more rather than less disastrous. 

TIL, many appear not to have noticed, has taken the spotlight off what really matters in Balearic public education: its performance. Governmental spin might suggest that TIL is the solution to performance ills, but it has made this suggestion while ignoring a fundamental issue - just why is this performance so bad? The government has made no attempt to address this. All it has done has been to bring in a highly questionable solution of flagship educational reform without tackling the underlying problem.

PISA ranks 65 countries' performance. It also details performance within regions of countries. The Balearics remains in the bottom four in each of the three key areas. It shares the dunces' corner with Murcia, Andalusia and Extremadura. This continuing underperformance is shocking not just because performance remains stubbornly poor in the Balearics but also because the Balearics is an altogether wealthier region than the likes of Extremadura. If general economic performance is supposed to equate to educational performance, then the Balearics is proof that it doesn't.

The estate agent Joana Maria Camps, who just so happens to be the Balearics education minister, stoked up the anticipation for the latest PISA survey results by speaking in the Balearic Parliament the other day about PISA. Or rather, she didn't speak about PISA. Some of you might know that there is a Spanish verb "pisar" which means to tread on. As such, this verb has nothing whatsoever to do with the PISA survey. There is a Catalan verb "trepitjar" which also means to tread on. Somehow, the estate agent managed to mistake PISA for the Spanish verb and then translate it into the Catalan verb. "Trepitja," she said. More than once. Parliamentary deputies, it is understood, were in fits of laughter.

You might say that this was a simple enough mistake, and if you were an estate agent who knows nothing about education, then it probably would be. If, however, you are meant to be a minister for education, it is more than just a mistake. It is an embarrassing howler of such gargantuan size that you should be shamed into returning to selling flats. Not Joana, however. It was, after all, only an error.

While Joana has womanfully been helping to tread on ("trepitjar" or "pisar", depending on your free selection of teaching language) common sense and trample it into floors of Balearics classrooms by insisting on an educational policy that defies common sense, she has failed to respond to the finding that a mere 18% of secondary school children are able to understand English sufficiently well enough to receive oral instruction, i.e. be taught in English. It may, though one can't be certain, that this 18% includes at least some children with one or two English-speaking parents. Furthermore, there has been no good explanation offered as to why testing of English ability has only now been done.

The part of the PISA report which deals with Spain speaks of low morale among teachers. "One in four students in Spain attends a school where the principal reports low teacher morale, compared with one in ten students across OECD countries." The report doesn't detail morale levels by region, but it is not difficult to conclude that in the Balearics this morale might be lower still and is only getting lower along with educational performance, as determined by PISA or "trepitja".