Completed at five days of strike summoned by the teachers’ unions of Cataloniathe latest agreement proposal put on the table by the Department of Education continues to be unreservedly rejected by the representative organizations of teachers, who even threaten to sustain their protests throughout the school year.
Regardless of the degree of reliability granted to the monitoring data offered by the Administration and by the organizers, or to the calculation of the participants in the demonstrations, it is difficult to argue that support for the protest has been far from unanimous and also has been declining as the days passed. It seems that the families have expressed an attitude of sympathy with the demands of the teachers, perhaps taking into account the demands for improvements in human resources more than the rejection of the early start of the school year, an issue that presumably many families will find more favorable to them. the proposal of the ‘conseller’ Gonzalez-Cambray than the flat-out refusal of the teachers. But they cannot take it for granted that this will continue to be the case if the conflict goes on forever and continues complicating family organization and the essential recovery of academic normality after two years seriously conditioned by the covid pandemic.
Many of the demands of the unions that have launched the mobilizations, especially in regard to staffing, can be subscribed by anyone who wants the highest possible quality for the educational public service provided by public and concerted schools, although what is on the table is whether they are economically sustainable. Others, like the rationalization of the summer schedule and the beginning of the course (about which Educació has been inflexible) or the application of news on the resume Precisely in such a complex year (on which it has yielded), they can be fields in which to move positions to recover the dialogue. There are still other elements that have contributed to adding reasons for the protest, such as the reorientation of pedagogical criteria in high schoolabout which there will hardly be agreement as they divide the educational community itself.
At almost all of these points, the Government of the Generalitat has proposed approaches to the demands that are put to him. And she shouldn’t have exhausted his scope to keep doing it yet. But in the face of Educació’s proposals, teachers should also make a move, without waiting for all their demands to be accepted or brandishing the perspective of a whole course of mobilizations that the educational community as a whole will hardly assume.
One of the points that keeps the disagreement open is the rejection by the unions of the clause that conditions the fulfillment of the agreements to “the approval of the budgets of the Generalitat for the financial year 2023 and following” and the “final approval of the Govern». We are talking about a series of commitments that exceed 250 million euros according to the calculation made by Educació of the measures that the organizers of the strike still consider insufficient. The approval by the Consell Executiu should not be subject to contingencies once this is the content that the Department of Education puts on the table. But it is unrealistic to demand guarantees on what content the forces represented in Parliament will vote for in the public accounts and it is risky to take for granted that the necessary investment will be available in any of the cases at a time when the economic uncertainty is maximum. Reversing the cuts that have been dragging on since 2012 is a fair objective, but one that would have been much more plausible just before an immense challenge for public finances whose outcome we still cannot even guess.