Dissatisfaction In The Classroom

I'm starting to think that all the statistical mumbo-jumbo that spews out of press release orifices of government and non-government might actually be of use, if only in that it can give me the hook for an article. Following on from the recent purchasing power revelation (it's down in the Balearics, despite economic recovery), there's another one of a consumer nature. Most of the Barclaycard-IESE (business school) report into consumer spending over the years of crisis was as you would have expected - huge falls in purchases of jewellery, furniture, household goods, for example - but it was the item for the greatest increase in spend which caught the attention. Up by 37% over the period from 2007 to 2014 was what was being forked out for education. It seems an extraordinary rise, especially given that the next highest rise (of 21%) was for utilities, and they were subject to steep increases in certain instances anyway, e.g. electricity, while internet provision would surely have played a part in higher telecommunications spend.

In third place was a 13% increase in health spending. Taken with that on education, a conclusion that might be drawn - and it's probably an accurate one - was that the public was fearful about cuts to public provision of the two sectors that consume far more of regional authorities' budgets than anything else: in the Balearics, health and education account for not far short of 80% of everything the government spends in a year.

But if we take the 13% on health to be a reflection of an increase in private health insurance, then perhaps we could have expected a similar sort of increase in spend on private schooling, but no, the figure was significantly greater.

Not all the 37% would have been on private schooling, as there would have been a fair amount going on training courses and higher education, but a goodly sum would have been going towards schools, and in looking for clues as to why, there are some lurking in the latest survey of opinions regarding education in the Balearics undertaken by the Gadeso research foundation.

Unsurprisingly, the survey reveals that overwhelmingly there are beliefs that education is vital for future job prospects and that education shouldn't be considered an expense but an investment in the future. It depends as ever, however, on who it is doing the investing, and herein, one suspects, lies the rub of that increased educational spending.

There was a perception, a fairly widely held one, that in the Bauzá years of crisis, there was a deliberate but unstated policy to drive parents towards the private sector. Though education spending remained comparatively high, there were cutbacks to education, and on top of these was all the fuss that was to break out over language policy. Allied to this was the far greater and regular attention that media circles were paying to performance of the Balearic public education system. The news was almost invariably less than positive.

The Gadeso survey shows that there is a continuing decline in satisfaction with this system. It also shows that it is believed that the system does not adequately address the needs of the workplace and that there is under-investment.

Put all this lot together, throw in the awareness of the need for a good education, and the greatly increased private spending on education over the years of crisis is understandable.

The survey doesn't particularly lay any blame with problems with the education system on the teachers. There is a concern about teacher motivation, but this can be taken as a consequence of a variety of things: lack of investment, the trilingual teaching (TIL) debacle, cutbacks. In fact, there is support for the teachers and their continuing to put pressure on the government. A majority of those surveyed believe that the decision not to call off the indefinite strike (or the possibility of taking strike action) is right.

But the teachers do need to be taken to task, some of them at any rate, and to be questioned about an ongoing struggle for power between the established unions and the Assemblea de Docents, the teachers' assembly. The unions seem inclined to accept that it is time to call off the strike and to be willing to give the new government a chance: the government is, after all, appointing over 350 additional teachers. The Assemblea isn't willing, and so threatens to kill at birth the government's desire for a grand "pact" to address and seek to solve the problems of the Balearic education system once and for all.

The survey does provide some clues as to why there was that huge increase in private spending on education, but it might also provide clues as to why this spending will continue. Until all parties come together and genuinely do create a pact for improvement, the dissatisfaction and underperformance will continue.

Chaos And Comedy

If the past few days in Mallorca have been a confusion of pre-electoral jockeying-for-position, then just wait until after today. What chaos may yet await us, unless Bauzá has his "Cameron moment" and sweeps into re-elected power with the sounds of teachers booing and braying in the background.

As things turned out, the strike arranged for the green tide of educational activists was a bit of a damp squib, albeit that the dampness of a squib has to be measured - as always in Mallorcan statistical terms - by a percentage. The Balearics education ministry stated "definitively" that 23.4% of the islands' 11,800 teachers went on strike last week, protesting - inevitably - against the Bauzá regime's educational policies and the introduction of the new national curriculum through LOMCE, the law on the quality of education.

The main thing that the green tide was objecting to, LOMCE-wise, was the test for nine-year-olds. Again, the education ministry was on hand to give some indication as to the "chaos" caused by this test. 6.84% of schools were reported as having "incidents" which prevented the test being taken. The association of primary school heads said that there was "chaos" on account of conflicting instructions that had emanated from the regional education ministry. It, the ministry, was unable for once to place a percentage on the level of its conflicting instruction.

But what was this test? Well, part of it required a spot of English. So, there was, for example, a multiple choice question. Fill in the missing word. "Where (blank) you going? I'm going to the park." What an opportunity was missed. When JR and Frankie Armengol went head to head for their debate on local TV, this should have been the question. How good is your trilingualism? José Ramón? "Erm, erm. Where do you going?" Wrong. Frankie? "I refuse to answer this on the grounds that I believe that TIL has produced chaos in the classrooms of the Balearics - at least 63.7% of them, that is." (Her percentage of course having been plucked entirely at random.)

JR might have been helped in getting the answer right had the presenter of the debate been one Miguel Angel Ariza, who caused a storm on his radio show for IB3 by announcing that listeners should vote for the PP. It was "unfortunate", he was to later admit, but insisted that it had been said as part of a "comedy" programme. Vota PP, the party of comedians. Perhaps. Journalist groups were not having his excuse, though. Impartiality, they screamed, those who had not been demonstrating their partiality in the lead-up to the election. A problem for Miguel, in trying to defend his humour, was that, as one example, on his blog of 19 December he wrote that "Bauzá is, has been and will be a good president", going on to praise a reduction in unemployment and greater wealth. Or maybe that had all been in the name of comedy as well.

The Struggle For Balearics Education

Two years of struggle. The very word struggle conjures up images and sentiments of great struggles of the past - workers' rights, women's rights, civil rights - all of them battles with established orders in demanding what was just and fair. But two years struggle in the Balearics? Two years for the rights of what precisely?

At Can Alcover in Palma, an exhibition is being held that celebrates the struggle of Balearics teachers, and in particular the Assemblea de Docents teachers' organisation, against the ramifications of trilingual teaching (TIL). The exhibition was in fact launched in Barcelona to commemorate the first anniversary of the massive anti-TIL demonstration in Palma at the end of September 2013. It has been brought over to Mallorca and it will be on display until 14 February. It shows, among other things, photos of the demo and charts the chronology of the struggle from the time that TIL was approved, through the sackings of two education ministers and the three-week strike, to the various "denuncias", the latest of them being against Isabel Cerdà, the director-general for planning, innovation and professional training at the education ministry, for a supposed abuse of office in respect of the "massive approval of TIL projects".

This has not been a struggle against TIL per se. It has been a struggle against the perceived unfairness and unjustness of a teaching regime that has sought to diminish the influence of Catalan. One neglects the past at one's peril, but notwithstanding the discriminations of the past and the potential for them to repeat themselves, styling this all as a struggle of some form of social injustice neglects what has been and remains a political confrontation. Both sides, teachers and government, have denied that they have had political motives, but they most definitely have: the struggle has been a clash between entrenched ideologies with language at their core. The unjustness and unfairness have been those that have plunged the education system into chaos; the victims are those on the receiving end of this system, the schoolchildren and many parents who have not been persuaded by the narrative of the teachers' struggle.   

Who pulled the first political trigger in all this mess is now pretty much irrelevant. The chronology of the struggle is thus also now irrelevant. What should be relevant and what should be the struggle is to come to an accord to create a rich, varied, contemporary public education system for a region of Spain which, linguistic arguments aside, has obstinately underperformed for way too long. Instead, and despite the protestations of government and teachers which insist that they have made paramount the needs of schoolchildren, the education system has been hung out to dry by a conflict which could have been predicted and one in which both sides have been eager participants. A plague on both their houses.

It suits the Assemblea to remind everyone of the struggle because of the next stage in its process. If, as they have threatened, the teachers go ahead with strikes in the lead-up to the regional election, these might easily backfire because of the weariness of parents. The teachers will believe otherwise: that strikes will be an additional force in bringing down the Partido Popular in May.

Strikes or no strikes, this may well happen in any event, and already there are clear indications as to what will transpire if there is a change of government. Francina Armengol of PSOE went on record months ago in saying that she would scrap TIL. On Saturday, at a conference in Palma, she spoke of taking "ambitious measures" in creating a quality public education system through a "social and political pact" that will restore peace to the classrooms. What such a pact might be and what such measures might also be, we are yet to find out, but it was perhaps no coincidence that Armengol should be speaking about such a pact when one has already been formed. Various bodies, such as the Assemblea and the Balearics parents association, have come together in drawing up what they would see forming a new education law, one to be introduced by an alternative government to the PP. While vague about but not dismissive of third language teaching, there would be a return to giving Catalan priority; a minimum 50% of teaching hours in Catalan without specifying what might be the maximum. 

Were this to come to pass, then the struggle would be over, but for how long? The four years it would take for the electorate to decide that it wants to bring the PP back into government? And then where would be? Back no doubt to the same arguments, the same conflict and the same struggle. Or maybe not. If there's one thing that many in the PP have discovered, it is that they sense some unjustness and unfairness in the current government's policies.

The Educational Week Of Madness

It was another week of total madness courtesy of the teachers and the education ministry. It did in fact start with sadness. The death last Sunday of Sebastià Serra, the leader of the STEI-i teachers' union, did not herald a period of respectful quietness, albeit that five hundred or so people stood in silence for half an hour on Monday in front of the government's Consulat de Mar HQ. They were being quiet by way of protest rather than by way of remembrance. Their silence, they hoped, would act as a means of finding a solution to the "Great Conflict", that of education.

One had started to think that all the carry-on over trilingual teaching and whatever other grievances the teachers could drag up was dying down. But no. He almost certainly won't die, or one hopes not, but Jaume Sastre, a teacher at Llucmajor's secondary school, has been on hunger strike since 8 May. It has been his way of seeking a solution to the "Great Conflict", whatever it is, because one fears we no longer really know. It certainly hasn't got anything to do with the teaching of English, or doesn't appear to have.

All manner of people and organisations got involved with the "Great Conflict" last week. They ranged from the United Nations to the Mallorcan hoteliers federation to the Balearics College of Lawyers to the Balearics Business Confederation. We haven't heard from Real Mallorca football club yet, but they have had other things to worry about, like getting relegated. Most of these organisations called for dialogue, but what is this dialogue meant to be about? Is it trilingual teaching, Catalan, the law of symbols, what exactly?

The letter to the UN, sent by supporters of Sastre at the Assemblea de Docentes (teachers' assembly), did at least shed some light. His hunger strike is "in defence of public education, of its quality and in Catalan". Ah yes, in Catalan. The regional government, the UN has been informed, has been acting in an "authoritarian and repressive" manner and has been doing so for the past nine months.

With the UN unwittingly dragged into the affair, the "Great Conflict" began to assume crisis proportions of a potentially global scale. Into the fray, therefore, stepped Inma de Benito, newly elevated to the vice-presidency of the Mallorcan hoteliers federation. It, the "Great Conflict", does not offer a good image of the islands to the outside world, she announced, but didn't add any words of advice as to how the conflict might be resolved. Quite why she came to be involved is a mystery, but she might just reflect that mugger-prostitutes on the streets of resorts and total hotelier antagonism to the rental of private holiday accommodation also don't offer the best of images to the outside world.

She did, however, suggest that President Bauzá knows what he has to do. Of course he does. He once said so, as in: "We know what to do and what we do and why we do what we say we are going to do, and we will continue doing what we have to do even though some do not think that we will do what we said we would do." Yes, he really did say this. Donald Rumsfeld would be proud. 

Bauzá's infamous we know what we're doing monologue was hauled out by the Assemblea in one of a series of videos it put out during the week under the general theme of "de-constructing Bauzá". They were intended to reveal his demagoguery, his lies, his "contradictions, dialectical traps and rare oratorical skills". And the president wasn't the only one to be accused of lying. There was, as always, also Joana Camps. She is constantly lying, said an Assemblea spokesperson, noting that the turnout for a strike on Thursday was 15% and not the 0.7% which Joana claimed. Oh yes, there was a strike, and then another one on Friday.

Joana, meantime, found that another battle front had opened up, one that involved her native Menorca. It was a "personal attack", she explained, in saying that a "denuncia" by the Assemblea had no chance of succeeding. The attack had to do with thirty-two trips she had made during eight months as education minister. Of the thirty-two, thirty had been to Menorca.

Sadly also for Joana, the leading member of the parliamentary awkward squad, Manacor's Antoni Pastor, also had a pop at her. The one who is responsible for the application of TIL is the president, he said. "You are a simple, necessary collaborator." The front, the fallguy (woman), the stooge. At least Pastor speaks some sense amidst the madness.

In A Bad Way: Balearics education and TIL

The Pau Casesnoves secondary school in Inca is located in a residential area of the town behind the grand edifice of the Garcia printing company. As one drives past the school there is a wall on which graffiti has been sprayed. Or it had been when I last went past perhaps three months ago. This graffiti declared opposition to attacks on Catalan teaching in the school and the Balearics as a whole. The school in Inca has been one of the more prominent in making its opposition to language reforms known. On Friday, the day of the return to school, teachers from Pau Casesnoves gathered for a photo. They were wearing green t-shirts from a body known as the Plataforma Crida. The t-shirts supported the teachers' strike and called for "quality public education". The objectives of the Plataforma, in addition to quality in education, include education in Catalan. The teachers in the photo at Pau Casesnoves were wearing the t-shirt and they were also holding a flag - the Catalan flag.

The strike by teachers in the Balearics, which may last until the end of the month, is styled as one against the introduction of TIL - the integrated treatment of languages - the lack of preparation for TIL, and the heavy-handed, non-consultative approach of the regional government (which culminated in the High Court's rejection of its procedure for implementation and the immediate declaration of a government decree to get around the court's decision).

This is, however, an over-simplification. There are indeed grave misgivings and justifiable misgivings about TIL and especially the haste in which it has been introduced. Some teachers, perhaps even a majority of them, will consider this to the prime reason for strike action, but I doubt that were it just about TIL that a strike would be happening. There is more to it.

Teaching in Catalan is also an educational issue, but it is also very much a political issue. The teachers at Pau Casesnoves did, in a sense, give the game away by holding up the Catalan flag. This is a strike, where some teachers are concerned (and again it may be a majority or it may not be), about teaching in Catalan.

If it is concerns about Catalan which are really at the heart of the strike, then it is a strike which been months in the making. Despite attacks by the regional government on Catalan in other ways - reducing or eliminating requirements to speak Catalan in some public-sector jobs, banning the use of "symbols" (such as the Catalan flag) and the display of the flag on public buildings, even the nonsensical proposal to change place names to Castellano (now forgotten about it seems) - there hasn't been concerted industrial action. The teachers' strike is that concerted action, and it has been action that unions and some opposition political parties have been angling for. They now have it.

It will be lamented that schoolchildren will be the ones to suffer and are the ones who least deserve to be in the firing-line of the divisions caused over Catalan. But there are a great number of parents who support the teachers, not just over TIL but also over Catalan teaching. This is not a strike without popular support, and the unions know this.

A reflection of this support lies with what was the government's first "assault" on Catalan teaching. This was the so-called free selection of teaching language whereby parents (at primary levels) could choose between Catalan and Castellano as the language they wished their children to be taught in. It has been a colossal flop in that the percentage of parents opting for Castellano has been nothing like that which the government would have hoped.

In the space of two years since it came to power, the Partido Popular government has introduced two major changes to education - one was free selection, the second is TIL. I am convinced that TIL, and its rushed agenda, is a direct response to the failure of free selection. The government has sought a different way to reduce Catalan teaching and has found it in trilingualism. It is for this reason that the strike is as much political as it is educational.

But then there are also grounds for believing that teachers might have taken strike action had the issue solely been an educational matter to do with TIL. It would have been an extreme form of protest but one must ask why the government appears to think that introducing TIL, and especially in the ham-fisted way in which it has been introduced, will be successful in the Balearics when the islands start from a position of disadvantage when it comes to trilingualism - a disadvantage from generally low educational standards anyway and the absence of a true foreign language culture. Why also does the government believes this might be a success where the Basque Country and other parts of Europe have demonstrated that trilingual education is far from straightforward. Has the government genuinely consulted with educationalists and academics? If it has, it should present the findings of its research. It should be transparent in pointing to how, educationally, trilingualism will be rolled out effectively.

I doubt that it will because I doubt that it has any findings. Not ones that would be convincing. TIL has merits, but the government has gone about it in the wrong way. A very bad way.  


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

A Balearic Lesson In Making Education Worse

I spoke the other day with a British woman whose children are at school locally. I asked her about the introduction of teaching in English. Her reaction did not surprise me. How can it work when neither teachers nor pupils can speak English well enough?

There will be exceptions. There will be teachers whose English is excellent. There will be pupils whose English is excellent, but don't be fooled into believing that children with English-speaking parents (or one parent) will necessarily be excellent. If these children have grown up in Mallorca, their English, especially their written English, may well be poor. Multilingualism, genuine multilingualism, requires immersion and constant reinforcement. If even English-speaking children aren't brilliant, then what possible hope is there for Mallorcan children?

There are of course educational regimes which operate multilingualism well, but they tend to be those which have promoted English (or other languages) for very many years and which have cultures highly geared to acceptance and use of other languages. In the Netherlands, as an example, watching the BBC has long been a common practice in Dutch homes. The Dutch, though, are a pragmatic people. As the person at the Amsterdam Stock Exchange with whom I collaborated some years ago once remarked: "we speak English because no one else speaks Dutch".

Mallorca and the Balearics are not known for their high levels of pragmatism, other than the pragmatism that is demanded to not rock the boat, and the boat that should not be rocked is one commanded by ideology, self-interest and power. Introducing trilingualism may sound as though it is a pragmatic response to tackling what has for too long been an underperforming state education system, but it is not pragmatic. Not when the right skills do not exist. Not when a culture of language acquisition does not exist. And not when the introduction is undertaken in an incoherent and hasty fashion with too little attention paid to practicalities but with a great deal of attention paid to ideology. For trilingualism to work, a considerable amount of ground work has to be done. For it to work, it needs to be introduced incrementally. Bit by bit. Evolution rather than revolution.

It is easy to be persuaded that there is a culture of language acquisition when one encounters the many Mallorcans who can speak English. Yes, there is a good deal of English ability knocking around but too little which is of a standard required to teach in English. There is much English spoken but as a survey of students at the University of the Balearic Islands revealed in 2010, two-thirds of these students admitted to not understanding English.

This failure is not unique to the Balearics. A professor from the University of Navarre pointed out not so long ago that great numbers of Spanish pupils, despite being taught English (as opposed to being taught in English), were leaving school still not able to speak English to any decent level.

The Balearic Government is right to try and confront the issue but it has gone about it in a wholly unsatisfactory manner. It wants trilingual revolution but will end up with a different type of revolution. It is already facing one. The revolt of teachers against the TIL scheme. The government has used the introduction of trilingualism to shield its antipathy towards Catalan and has so insisted on revolution as a fast-track device to bring Catalan to heel. This is the ideology. One that is wrapped up as securing the future of the children of the Balearics, or so the president would have everyone believe.

The teachers are using the same ideology but in reverse. They are aghast at the potential for Catalan to be undermined, but in their defence they do also appreciate, far better than the government, the pedagogical problems raised by trilingualism. But because the teachers (their unions at any rate) are a bunch of lefty, Catalanist agitators, the government has ignored them. And it was this disregard which led the Balearics High Court to tell the government that its procedure for scheduling the implementation of TIL was wrong. The government had not consulted properly, just as, only hours after the court's decision, it revealed it had not consulted at all in magicking up some decree to permit TIL to go ahead as of this Friday.

The principle of TIL is not wrong but the implementation is totally wrong. Blind dogma has led the government down a path towards chaos in the classrooms, chaos that will be even greater if PSOE were to return to power in 2015 and scrap TIL (they have said they will). The government, far from taking measures to improve educational performance, has adopted one that will worsen it.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.