The Supreme Court has dealt a setback to the Government of the Community of Madrid by dismissing the appeal that it filed last year against the state curriculum that establishes what students from all over Spain must study in Baccalaureate. Isabel Díaz Ayuso’s team denounced that the text invaded their regional powers, the same argument that regions such as Catalonia and the Basque Country have used in other disputes with the State. But the High Court rejects his allegation and considers that the challenged royal decree does give him space to exercise his own powers and “complete” the minimum teachings established by the Ministry of Education.
In a sentence for which the conservative magistrate José Luis Requero has been a rapporteur, the TS tells Ayuso that “he can hardly reproach” the Government norm for “an exhaustiveness that stifles the possibility of exercising its powers” when it has been able to approve without no problem your own regional curriculum. He reminds him that the preamble to this Madrid rule states that “it fully exercises its powers with full respect for the principles of good regulation”, a formula that the Supreme Court interprets as meaning that Madrid has been able to develop its own powers without any obstacles.
Madrid was the only autonomous community that resorted to the curriculum of the minister of Pilar Alegría. The National Catholic Confederation of Parents and Parents of Students (Concapa) filed appeals against the curriculum of the different stages (Infantile, Primary, ESO and Baccalaureate) and the first two have also already been dismissed.
These rules sowed much controversy in the educational community. The Royal Academy of History complained because content (Al Ándalus, the Catholic Monarchs or the Habsburgs) was eliminated when everything prior to 1812 was deleted. It accused Alegría of introducing “an overrepresentation of political content” with “distorting elements of the historical vision ” and “a presentist bias”, with many contents that “are not from History”, but from sociology or politics, such as “multiple identities”, “ecosocial behavior” or “gender domination”.
The State Council and the State School Council also alerted the Government of “the complexity, abstraction and difficulty of putting this curriculum into practice, since knowledge is mixed with attitudes that, on a day-to-day basis, have created problems for teachers when evaluating and measuring whether students have learned or not. Even a report issued by the Ministry of Territorial Policy warned in its day that the rule was so detailed that it could lead to jurisdictional disputes.
Ayuso, for his part, considered that the State was intruding on his margin of competence, since educational powers are transferred to the autonomous communities. He said that Alegría had put so many things in the curriculum that the so-called “minimum teaching” did not leave Madrid “regulation margin.” It invoked the doctrine of the Constitutional Court that says that the State Administration is competent to establish the curriculum that includes the minimum teachings (50%-60% of the student’s timetable, according to the Celaá Law) and that the autonomous governments approve the curriculum of each level of education from these minimum teachings” (the other 50%-40% of the timetables).
He also considered the resource that certain contents were “indoctrinating”, especially in those of History subjects. But the Fourth Section of the Contentious-Administrative Chamber reprimands Ayuso, giving him to understand that he has not well founded his appeal. It seems to irritate him that he did not provide examples of the alleged indoctrinating or excessively competent content, since he told the court to do it himself. “Far from assuming such a burden, he throws all that mass of subjects for the consideration of the Chamber,” he scolds him, remembering that the Bachillerato curriculum occupies more than 400 pages in the BOE.
It also pulls his ears for “silencing” the observations that the Royal Academy of History made in its day, “which would have had some probative use.” The Community of Madrid requested that the file be completed to unite the observations of the Royal Academy of History and the allegations that, in the process of public information, provided by some professional associations, but, according to the Supreme Court, these “observations and allegations do not have received any consideration from the plaintiff, neither in the lawsuit nor in conclusions”.
“It alludes to ideological biases in some of the subjects, such as the History of Spain and History of the Contemporary World. Well, if that assumption is true, and seeing how the Community of Madrid has completed the minimum teachings with its decree 64/2022 [el development of the Baccalaureate curriculum], not only silences the fact that it has not been able to complete them but also reorients them towards neutral approaches”, says the Supreme Court to Madrid, which precisely in its decree 64/2022 what it did was correct all those issues that it considered that the State did wrong in its norm, recovering, for example, the study of the Catholic Monarchs or the reading of Don Quixote, which Alegría had removed. In other words, in his part of the curriculum, he had room to do what he wanted.
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