Lucas Gortazar, Deputy Director and Head of Education at EsadeEcPol and Education Consultant at the World Bank, and Xavier Bonal, Professor of Sociology and Director of the Globalization, Education, and Social Policies (GEPS) Research Group at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB), have analyzed the causes of Catalonia’s poor results in the PISA report and have proposed possible actions to reverse them in the third session of the ‘Actualitat en Cercle’ cycle.
Xavier Bonal assured that in order to improve the quality of education in Catalonia “schools with the highest level of social complexity need to have the best teachers”. He also asked for “more autonomy for the schools” and “changes that generate greater involvement among the teaching staff”. According to Bonal, the poor results on the PISA tests “are a reflection of the complex social composition in Catalonia, with a volume of schools with high numbers of immigrant students and with very low social and cultural profiles”. The professor of Sociology and director of the Globalization, Education, and Social Policies (GEPS) Research Group at the UAB pointed to “a crisis of confidence inside the educational sector itself” and a “lack of motivation among teachers”, which he attributed to a “lack of investment and promotion strategies and incentives”.
The Deputy Director and Head of Education at EsadeEcPol and Education Consultant at the World Bank Lucas Gortazar observed that there is “a major mismatch between expectations about education in the last decade and what is actually happening”, which “decreases moral”. Gortazar added that the differences between “good and bad students” and also “between schools and socioeconomic levels” have widened. Gortazar stated that the linguistic immersion model in Catalan “does not significantly affect the students’ results”. Even so, he indicated that “it limits the number of people who can be teachers”, which results in “difficulties in filling positions" and "can affect educational quality”.
Bonal and Gortazar agreed when stating that the poor results of Catalan students on PISA “are not due to immigration as such, but to the segregation in schools”. “We have a problem between schools and also within schools,” Xavier Bonal emphasized in this sense.
