The 'Celaá law' dissected by six protagonists

In March, the enrollment period for the 2021-2022 academic year opens, and the Government's intention is that the Lomloe (Organic Law for the Modification of the LOE) - better known as the

- then get going.

EL PAÍS dissects through six protagonists (three parents and three teachers) the eighth educational reform of democracy, which affects 8.2 million students and, like all of them, was born preceded by a great fight and without a pact of the major parties .

The end of the ghettos

The great objective of the

is to achieve an equity in the school that does not exist.

Today nine out of 10 children without resources and eight out of 10 children of immigrants are enrolled in public school, despite the fact that it instructs 67.1% of the students (the concerted one for 25.5% and the private one for 7.4 %).

Even the always cautious Andreas Schleicher, director of the PISA educational quality tests, reproaches the scenario: “The private sector in Spain has become a way of segregating students by their social context, but it does not seem very effective when it comes to raise education, at least according to PISA results ”.

The Government considers that subsidized education (paid for with everyone's taxes) should pitch in more.

Among the NGOs fighting to undo the ghettos is Save The Children, where the psychologist Sara Adrián works, who coordinates the Puerto Rubio Resource Center for Children and Adolescents (CRIA) in Madrid.

In this bright and colorful space, a group of teachers and social workers attend to a hundred children whose parents cannot help them with their homework due to their poor training or insufficient knowledge of Spanish.

School aid is "essential" for these minors.

The so-called "summer forgetfulness" translates in his case into an academic setback of one month.

While wealthy students learn by traveling, disadvantaged students use up those hours of embarrassment by watching television.

If a child does not pay for the supplementary class, they have to leave the classroom in 10% of the subsidized centers of seven communities analyzed in a report commissioned by the parents of the public school (CEAPA) and the employer's private school (CICAE) .

In Madrid, assures the consultant, it occurs in 28% of the contracts.

Whether or not the figure is exaggerated, the truth is that this discrimination is experienced in the classrooms, and that is why some NGOs successfully demanded that the Government remove the paid activities of the school day.

"We are in contact with the dozen centers - public or concerted religious - in which they study and they tell us where they are lacking, what duties they have," says Adrián, who would like some schools to get more involved.

All students come from the Madrid City Council Social Services.

The psychologist calls for more resources for the centers maintained by the State without distinguishing their ownership.

During the pandemic, the NGO left the boys a tablet to be able to follow the classes, he says, and many cannot return it because the ones promised by the Administrations have not arrived

Madrid is the second region in Europe that segregates the most in schools (also in public ones).

For what is this?

"To the geographical segregation of social groups, but also to the establishment of a single area for the choice of center, standardized tests, the promotion of subsidized centers or the differentiation between bilingual and non-bilingual centers in English", it is stated in a recent article in the

.

For this reason, the law provides that the proximity to the center prevails when enrolling a child.

Each autonomy will set for each school a quota of students with special needs ―the ratios will be lower in sensitive areas―, there will be “living places” for enrollment during the course (often for immigrants), it will not be possible to assign public land to build a school private or admissions processes will be more transparent.

The whip of the concerted

Concerted religious education has mobilized its entire arsenal against the

and in the first battalion there are always two of these schools ―Tajamar (boys) and Los Tilos (girls) -, which are located just two kilometers from the center of Save The Children, all three in the working-class Puente de Vallecas district of Madrid.

Opus Dei inaugurated Tajamar in 1958 among rubbish heaps at the express wish of its founder, Jose María Escrivá de Balaguer, who wanted to give school to part of the 12,800 marginalized children in the neighborhood, according to his website.

Pablo Táuler, father of nine children and president of the school's Ampa - which teaches a highly reputed FP - insists that the center does not segregate.

“Almost all the students [2,000] are from the neighborhood.

The son of an EMT driver, a taxi driver ... and 20% is an immigrant.

There are Chinese, Venezuelans, some Syrians ... ”, he says, although he acknowledges that some of it comes from other areas with more purchasing power (Moratalaz, Vicálvaro or Rivas).

The children of families without means, however, do not move from the neighborhood and that is why the law ends with the single zone, it rewards proximity to the house.

"Why do they force me to go to this fishmonger below my house if I like the one beyond?", Criticizes Táuler, 46, a professional in the financial sector, the "authoritarianism" of the law.

This father, who misses more consensus in the processing of the law and that it was not gestated after the pandemic, assures that in Tajamar "only" you have to pay a monthly fee of 114 euros and there is aid for the needy (ranging from 220 euros to 560 per course).

"We have discussed it with the school, there are scholarships, whoever has only 10 euros to put that in," he says.

However, on the web there are many other concepts to pay.

For example, in primary education, 30 euros are broken down as monthly expenses for each subject for which one more hour is received per week (up to six subjects are offered), 20 for tablet management, 10 for "online communication", 30 of

(telemedicine) or 50 of “inter-assessment”.

The Government wants to stop this drain of money —they are irregular and very popular quotas, which are also tax-deductible for families, although it is prohibited— but it is a fact that the concerted one is underfunded.

The Catalan Government estimates the imbalance at 145 million euros.

Faced with this budget deficit, the law proposes that a commission evaluate the economic decline and take it into account in future Budgets.

The PP, which like the PSOE has tiptoed through this thorny issue when it governs, came to set up a negotiating table with the one agreed in 2011, but no one sat there until 2018, with Isabel Celaá as minister.

Táuler defends the separation of the sexes in the classroom.

The development of women, he maintains, is prior to that of men, and these two speeds do not coexist well in class.

"Boys and girls do not share space, but they link outside," explains the father, as their buildings are attached.

The Government believes that these centers discriminate and in order to "promote effective equality between men and women" it intends to take away the concert, but it seems very complicated.

The Constitutional Court and the Supreme Court have not seen segregation in their sentences before previous attempts in Andalusia, and that is why the Socialists did not include the measure in the draft, but they have ended up yielding to the insistence of Podemos.

Disability as an instrument

“Every year there are problems with children who do not enroll in the [ordinary] center because they want to because there is no educational assistant, we are discriminated against,” Angela Rodríguez, 36, mother of Noa, aged three, is desperate. Down's Syndrome.

This occupational therapist and her husband, Javier, cast the papers for the public school in their neighborhood in Oviedo, very convinced of their decision.

You can walk and Noa's friends from nursery school would come.

"Before breeding did not walk safely and caught the

in psychomotor exercises ,

" recalls Angela tenderly.

In the schooling report, the counselor determined, in parallel, that the little girl was going to need a hearing and language teacher, a therapeutic pedagogy teacher, and an educational assistant during the course.

And hence the bad news in July.

They denied Noa a place for lack of the latter in the center and they referred her to another school further away in which she has not been enrolled.

“If I had 11 points, children have entered with much less!

They are discriminating against her when I haven't asked for anything.

It was them! ”Angela is indignant.

In theory, with the new law, all schools will have the means to educate children like Noa.

She has returned to the nursery school last year while her parents, like another couple in Gijón, continue to battle for the square with lawyers.

"It worries me because the weeks go by and the children are advancing and she, who is learning at her own pace, is not there," says the mother sadly.

From the Ministry of Education of Asturias they explain that the will of the parents and the existing resources are combined and Noa has been admitted to a school in her area of ​​influence that has specialists and assistants.

If an issue stings the government, it is the issue of disability, the main weapon of the Stop Celaá movement, which insists on denouncing that the new rule will end up leading to the disappearance of special schools.

“The special education centers are not going to close.

Ladies and gentlemen, stop playing with vulnerability, to confront this Government with such a delicate and sensitive issue, ”Luz Martínez Seijo, Socialist spokesperson for Education in Congress, demanded last Thursday from the right-wing benches.

The idea is to adapt traditional schools within 10 years so that they can accommodate more children with disabilities and attend special education centers - which will serve as a reference and train teachers - those schoolchildren who cannot be served " within the framework of the measures of attention to the diversity of the ordinary centers ”, that is, only those that need“ highly specialized ”education, according to the norm.

Families opposed to the new regulation consider that by limiting the role of special education centers in this way, they will have to end up closing due to lack of resources.

Given the uproar, the Government insists that the application of the rule will take into account "the will of families" in schooling, but families believe that it does not give them guarantees that they can choose to take their children to education special.

17% of Spanish students with disabilities (35,000) now attend special centers.

Critics of the law distrust that with the regulation all schools will have adequate means and also believe that there are problems of coexistence and integration that are very difficult to overcome in an ordinary center.

The UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities has reprimanded Spain for the lack of integration of these minors, following the case of the student Rubén Calleja, also with Down Syndrome, who was forced to leave his primary school at the 11 years old and enrolling in a special center.

The resolution has arrived a decade late.

Rubén is already 21 years old.

The Spanish Committee of Representatives of People with Disabilities (CERMI), the ONCE or Down Spain are great promoters of inclusion.

On the other hand, many other entities have joined the Inclusive platform, yes, Special too, to protest the law.

The Castilian War

The Barcelona-born Ana Losada presides over the Assembly for a Bilingual School (AEB) of Catalonia and this Wednesday she protested before Congress over the decision in the law that Spanish cease to be a reference as a vehicular language for the entire State, an expression that appears by first time in 2013 in

That was the red line for Esquerra to support the rule.

The AEB analyzed 2,214 educational programs in Catalan public schools a few months ago and found none in which the vehicular language was Castilian, so in reality the article of the

does not change anything.

"Only in 126 centers do they include at some stage a subject in Spanish, which is usually Physical Education, Plastic ...".

In concert more of the same.

It ensures that they only have evidence that 12 subsidized centers - there are 1,305 - offer more than two hours of Spanish a week in primary school.

Losada, 52, enrolled her daughter in her private school in Hospitalet.

Until 5th year of EGB she studied in Spanish and since then half of the subjects in Catalan.

A scenario very different from that of his daughter, who studied only two hours in Spanish a week, those of Language, until in 2016 a court - based on rulings of the Supreme Court and the Superior Court of Justice of Catalonia - ordered that she receive the 25% of the curriculum in Spanish after Losada filed an appeal.

The school girl is already in secondary school and studies (and with her her classmates) in this language three hours of Language and Literature and three and a half hours of Social Sciences.

At the time Losada, with a degree in History, left the school chat because of the tension.

Over time, "the situation has become very normal" and even "many parents have privately thanked me that their children study more in Spanish."

The promoters of the article in the law assure that the objective is "to facilitate the linguistic immersion programs" of the autonomous regions with a co-official language and maintain that Catalan schoolchildren have a command of Spanish equal to or higher than the average.

“The Government has sent a message: you cannot study in Spanish throughout the State.

With this change, the Basque Government can transform the regime of three educational systems (Spanish, Basque and mixed) to one and that nothing happens ”, disagrees Losada.

He insists that he does not want to go back to Franco's time: “My daughter, raised in a Spanish-speaking environment, should study 60% of the time in Catalan (and 40% in Spanish) and Vic's boy, who only listens to Catalan in home, the other way around, 60% in Spanish ”.

Catalan is written by 65.3% of the inhabitants, when in 1981 there were only 31.5%, according to data from the Generalitat.

Education within everyone's reach

Ernesto Gutiérrez-Crespo is a counselor at the Elorrieta-Erreka Mari Integrated VET Center in Bilbao.

The Basque Country is proud to have a traditionally low rate of early leaving the classrooms (7.3% of young people have at most an ESO degree), when the Spanish woman blushes and leads the queue in Europe with a 17, 9%.

Gutiérrez, pedagogue and psychologist, does not doubt the reason: “In Euskadi the investment is much higher.

And that is seen in the ratios by class, in the attention to diversity, the support ... ”.

If Spain wants to improve its indices - it no longer meets the goal set by the EU of 15% drop-out this year - there is no other choice but to invest more in training, because in this we are also a red lantern.

Aid to the laggards decreased by 90% in the years of the Minister of Popular Education José Ignacio Wert.

The Government has committed to increasing spending to reach 5% of gross domestic product by 2025. In 2017, the last year for which there is data, it was 4.24%.

In 2030, 65% of job offers will require professionals with medium qualifications and 35% with high qualifications - according to an EU study -, and the ministry is aware that it is necessary to ensure that all schoolchildren have a minimum preparation.

Today one in three has repeated at least once at the age of 15 and it is a mechanism of frustration, in addition to having a very high economic cost (3,340 million euros a year, according to the ministry).

“Repetition is useless if you do not break with the above and bet on new methodologies.

You have to make a personalized plan, ”says Gutiérrez-Crespo, president of the Euskadi Association of Psychopedagogy.

He sets the example of collaborative learning based on VET challenges that is applied in his community.

The new law provides that in primary school it can only be repeated once and no more than two before reaching the age of 16.

Minister Íñigo Méndez de Vigo himself, who replaced Wert, acknowledged this in this newspaper: "I have understood that repeating a year is not the solution."

The

allows passing high school with a failure, a fact that has created a great scandal, but which is common practice in the cloisters.

The norm also ends with the early itineraries that force the student to opt for FP or baccalaureate subjects at the age of 14.

Gutiérrez agrees with his disappearance, which conditions the life of the minor from very early on and, above all, appreciates that there are catwalks that allow him to continue studying.

"It is good that they are not exclusive itineraries, that with some subjects one can go on to high school from the Middle FP", he says.

In 3rd year of ESO, students who do poorly may enroll in a curricular diversification program (which simplifies the curriculum), which will continue in 4th year and will allow them to obtain the title.

The idea is also that the watertight compartments of the subjects disappear - "the role of the teacher must be different," he thinks - that the autonomies decide more contents of the programming and give more freedom of action to the centers, today drowned in paperwork and corsets.

Drifting religion

To Madrid Pablo Coronado, graduated as a Physical Education teacher, part of the family and his friends have recommended that he recycle with some exams and stop being a Religion teacher, now that the subject is going to lose strength in school and position who is not an official.

However, he, the father of four children, has no doubts: "People seek stability, but I continue to cling to what the Lord has wanted, and that is to educate children in the values ​​that their parents desire."

The agreements with the Vatican of 1979 - which the Government wants to renegotiate - prevent the Religion class from leaving the day, but now this subject will not have an alternative.

It will appear - if the student chooses Religion - in their report card, although it will not count.

This, de facto, will mean that in the public or non-religious (minority) concerted school many students who chose it to improve their grade in high school - instead of French or Technical Drawing - or thinking of a scholarship do not take it, which may suppose a loss of jobs for professors of Religion, because they are not civil servants - they are proposed by the bishop and their salary is borne by the State -, but permanent or temporary.

"It is said a lot that the Lomce

favored us, but left the duration of the classes in the hands of the communities and in some places 45 minutes a week are taught."

The State invests a year 300 million in the payment of the 12,994 Religion teachers (data for the 2018-2019 academic year).

"The agreements say that Religion has to have a treatment comparable to the other fundamental disciplines and it will not be complied with," complains Coronado, who represents the professors of this matter in the ANPE union.

"What is being done in Spain is to go against the current of Europe," he emphasizes.

In other countries - not the case in France - there is an alternative subject that raises dilemmas from a non-denominational point of view.

“That is what the Episcopal Conference has proposed to the Government.

A subject about where we come from, where we are going, the importance of the other, acts of solidarity… ”, he lists.

The bishops regretted this Friday that their proposal "has not received a response from the ministry."

What will schoolchildren who do not take Religion do if there is no alternative?

The law is silent, it is left in the hands of the centers and the autonomies.

Another reason for a row while the PP takes the

to the Constitutional Court

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