Spain is a country with strong educational inequality. Students in Asturias are at the same level in Reading Comprehension as those in Finland, while those in Catalonia are only slightly better than those in Kazakhstan. There is an academic difference between Asturians and Catalans at a crucial stage: at age 10, the moment when they go from learning to read to learning to read. The data from the international PIRLS report say so, results that analyze the reading performance of 4th grade students from 57 countries, which should have been known when the report was made public, on the 16th, but which the Ministry of Education decided seize “so as not to interfere in the electoral process,” according to sources from Pilar Alegría’s team.
On other occasions, international and regional data have been published at the same time. In this edition of PIRLS, seven Autonomous Communities have participated with extended samples, as well as Ceuta and Melilla. Asturias and the Canary Islands decided to skip the embargo decreed by the Ministry after seeing that the results improved, of which they could get their chests up during the campaign. Navarra was participating for the first time, but saw that his grades were higher than the Spanish average (524 compared to 521). The Community of Madrid, Castilla y León, Andalusia and Catalonia, which have worsened, maintained a significant silence: their results show them.
Catalonia is the region that loses the most points (it goes from 522 points that it obtained in 2016 to 507). Its drop, of 15 points, is the equivalent of losing almost half a school year and is already below the Canary Islands, a region that does not stand out in international rankings. The second lowest in this classification is Madrid (from 549 to 539, a decrease of 10 points), followed by Castilla y León (from 546 to 538: eight points less) and Andalucía (from 525 to 523: two points subtracted ).
On the other hand, they get better results than in the previous edition of PIRLS Asturias (from 548 to 550: two more points) and Canarias (from 505 in 2011 to 510: five points). Melilla has obtained 499 points and Ceuta, 498. It cannot be compared with other editions of the study because it is the first time that they have participated in the extended sample, but they are slightly better than Turkey and worse than Albania or Israel.
The Spanish PIRLS report, prepared by the Ministry of Pilar Alegría, says that Spain’s average score (521) is “significantly below” the average for OECD countries (533) and the EU 8528). He adds that Asturias, Madrid and Castilla y León obtain an average score “significantly higher than that of Spain as a whole, while those that are significantly below that are the Canary Islands, Catalonia, Melilla and Ceuta
The International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA), author of the PIRLS, calculates that a difference of 40 points is equivalent to one school year. The Spanish average lost 7 points in reading ability during Covid, as students took the PIRLS exam in 2021. Lucas Gortázar, head of Education at the think tank EsadeEcPol, recalls that “the United Kingdom (which has had very good results in this study) is dedicating a significant public investment to reinforcement tutoring programs and school accompaniment to students with greater difficulties”.
He associates “the low investment” in education in Madrid and Catalonia with the drop in these communities and insists that “we are probably talking about the most profitable investment that the public powers could carry out.”
In addition, he is critical of the embargo on regional data and warns that “we have a serious problem with transparency in education in Spain, where we consider that evaluation data ‘interferes’ in an electoral campaign instead of informing the citizen” . “It is a problem that does not depend on ideology or the vision of education that those responsible for the autonomous governments or the Ministry may have. It is a problem with deeper roots for which simplifications are not worth it,” he stresses.
“I believe that the result of Catalonia is partly due to devoting so much effort to the language issue. This issue is diverting attention and efforts to improve skills in other areas. Catalonia has a worse result than would be expected due to its socioeconomic level and Asturias is above the result that would correspond to it by socioeconomic level,” warns Ismael Sanz, professor of Applied Economics at the Rey Juan Carlos University and researcher at the London School of Economics.
Álvaro Choi, professor of Applied Economics at the University of Barcelona, ??is the author of a study that points out that the model of linguistic immersion that is followed in schools in Catalonia is weighing down the academic performance of Spanish-speaking students. In his opinion, these results “are worrisome and deserve careful analysis.” “Although they fall to the average level for the OECD and also for Spain, in Catalonia they fall in a higher proportion, and the difference in results is statistically significant compared to the national average,” he points out, concerned that “the Catalan results are similar or lower than those of Autonomous Communities with socioeconomic levels much lower than those of Catalonia”.
“Surely there are additional factors that are affecting the results of Catalan students. For example, and despite being a taboo subject in Catalonia, it would be worth evaluating the impact of the fact that students answer in PIRLS in a language other than their mother tongue If at 15 years of age -in PISA- it has already been seen that this effect exists, it is reasonable to think that, at 9 or 10 years of age, which is the age of the participating students in PIRLS, this effect may still be greater”, he points out, emphasizing that the language issue “could explain the lower performance but not the magnitude of the drop in the performance of Catalan students between 2016 and 2021”.
Choi also criticizes that the data has been hidden. It should be remembered that only seven of the 17 Autonomous Communities have wanted to participate in this study, which allows them to have an up-to-date X-ray of the situation in which their students find themselves. The case of the Basque Country is striking, which had agreed to participate in PIRLS 2021 with an expanded sample, as it did in 2016, but canceled at the last minute. And it is that its results (it obtained 517 points on that occasion, the last of all the regions analyzed and well below the Spanish and European averages) were not to boast.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project