School Failure

The Valencia doubles the rate of school failure in the European Union. The stunning claim has been made this month by the sociologist Antonio Valencia Ariño, during the First Forum on Innovation, Economy and Quality of Life.

If the quality of education in Spain is already meager, according to every measure, the Community of Valencia is one of the lowest in the country. He acknowledged the other day the Minister of Education, Font de Mora, who runs a television journalist Eduardo Mayor: "Until the Spanish region of better education is below the OECD average," ie, the world's most developed countries.

This data is overwhelming. But there's more. The Ministry of Education issued last May, the first comprehensive assessment of diagnosis, with children 9 and 10 years, while La Rioja is located the first of the 17 autonomous communities, Valencia was the last, just above the cities of Ceuta and Melilla.

Some of that was due to intuit and when our community and Extremadura refused to participate in the PISA international report, which assesses students' knowledge of 15 years and that makes Spain not only in tail positions, but down from a report to another. Was it a premonition of things to come? Did you know that our authorities and then be evidence of our school's academic disaster?

It is not easy to diagnose the causes of school failure, early abandonment of the classroom and the meager level of education provided by our compulsory education. I do not want to use for this particular expertise dispersion unsuccessfully tried to amend Esperanza Aguirre when he was Minister of Education, or the morbidity of an unmotivated teachers, which attempts to correct the minister Font de Mora reinforcing the authority of teachers.

Surely, the causes come from afar. Although not as Zapatero said in his last speech in the Senate, today blamed the disaster on the training received during the Franco regime. What do you know him from this and other things when it turns out 40 years ago the level of our school, with a demanding learning was much higher than the French or British?

Now the situation is very serious, with families outside the educational process in parent associations involved just over 10% more politicized and militant unions, and a classroom used as instruments of political mobilization. If so, it is serious in itself nationally, although the minister? Angel Gabilondo try to boost vocational training as a viable alternative to counteract school failure, in our community takes specific characters: how to teach in English when even teachers were at least able to do with the controversial subject of Education for Citizenship? What do we intend to in Chinese as the Spanish language students leave with a Valencian Mitjà grau and are not able to maintain a minimal conversation in that language?

All this adds up to failure on failure when, in fact, our country suffers from a serious "loss of competitiveness in talent and technology", as recognized by the major document on the future of Spain, inspired by Eduardo Serra, just give one hundred qualified representatives civil society, among them, Juan Roig, Santiago Grisolia and Juan Iranzo, to His Majesty Juan Carlos I.