The Conselleria d’Educació has made public this week the results of the tests of basic skills for students in sixth grade and fourth grade ESO. Some more or less significant fluctuations are noted, but without major relevant changes or that represent consolidated trends with respect to the usual results.
If we focus on the detail, the increase in results in English and, not so significantly, in mathematics It could be an effect of the progressive recovery of what was lost during the pandemic in areas where in-person intervention by teachers is more necessary. And the worse results in oral expression in Catalan compared to Spanish They can perfectly be a reflection of daily practice among the generations analyzed.
If we delve deeper, a certain tendency to reduce the distance between the group of students with the worst results and those with skills above average may have different explanations. The most positive, if so, would be to interpret it as a consequence of policies to correct educational segregation, that try to reduce the concentration of schoolchildren with greater needs in only some centers.
Another possible reason would be, again, a delayed and positive effect of the recovery of normality: if the students whose families have fewer resources (economic or cultural capital) are the ones who suffered the most from school disconnection, it would be logical that they would benefit from the return of presence. However, enough time has passed for post-pandemic effects to be the default solution to explain any distortion in results or ordinary school operations.
These periodic tests also detect less temporary phenomena. Segregation may be reduced, but it is still excessive. The results of the general tests in Catalan and Spanish have often been used from different interested perspectives: nor do they necessarily prove that the level of Catalan and Spanish is equivalentsince both tests may not be strictly homologous to each other, nor can the results be considered as proof of the failure of the immersion model.
What is demonstrated is a general erosion of linguistic ability, expression and understanding of the students in both languages. Attention deficit, loss of the reading habit, difficulty in dealing with discourses that are not fragmentary and brief are warning signs that require reflection on teaching practice, but also on the cultural consumption habits in each family. The same thing happens with mathematics: Pedagogical innovation should not be a dogma, and should undergo a rigorous analysis of its results.
In Spain, an Anglo-Saxon style school-by-school ranking system has been renounced so as not to turn them into an additional instrument of inequality. As proposed, the basic skills tests serve to detect individual students who require more attention and schools in poorer situations that require more decisive intervention from the Administration. The fact that these data are not public does not mean that these two instances do not act accordingly to correct deviations.