Portugal seeks the education and future of its children – ECO
A good educational policy could change something in our country if the announced decentralization and security of school autonomy were a reality.
People’s education is the “rock” on which the present and future of a society rests. Its importance is even greater when a country follows a trajectory of economic loss compared to its main allies and partners, as is the case of Portugal. In these cases, countries should take care to understand what are the causes for their poor performance.
Portugal is a “bad” example of a country that is lagging behind and where young people emigrate more and more. The diagnosis of what is wrong with Portuguese society has been done for a long time, but it continues to be ignored by those in power and by the majority of Portuguese people.
Education is one of the areas where much is wrong, but as one of the foundations of all development it should be seen as too important to ignore. Unfortunately, after 7 years in power, a concern shown by the current minister is not that education works well or that the Portuguese have liked to look for work in other countries.
His main concern seems to be to send messages to students about how they should behave, that students learn to demonstrate in the streets and that they threaten to become entangled in “gender” ideology and anti-racist, anti-xenophobic, anti-homophobic and “anti-everything” which dislikes him and his advisors, and which is not inclusive.
It is not relevant to encourage students to be the best or to want to earn more because merit is not very inclusive. Valuing the merit or individual effort of students is not very inclusive, because some have it and others don’t. The ministry’s philosophy is that if some don’t have it, then others shouldn’t have much either. It is better for everyone to have a little than for some to have a lot and others a little.
It was with these ideas that the current minister brought a new paradigm to educational policy in Portugal. It is an original educational policy, because instead of promoting knowledge, it promotes guidance when it is necessary for its (the policy’s) success, and for that it tries to erase everything that deviates from the line that its imagination and ideology conceive. .
The examples of this educational policy that promotes mediocrity and inclusion are numerous. The most obvious is the evolution of Portuguese students during a pandemic, when they were closed and unable to attend classes in person. Schools and colleges had to make a huge effort to get virtual classes up and running and exceed the minister’s hollow promises about the delivery of computers.
Even some groups such as Alvide, in the municipality of Cascais, which were preparing for online training even before the pandemic, refer to having had difficulties and limitations in adapting to the new reality of confinement. What will become of schools that had not even begun to think about the issue and found themselves facing a situation where teachers and students were forced to stay at home?
The case of Portugal was not unique, of course. But in countries concerned with the evolution of student learning, and which therefore assessed the effects of the pandemic, the results were very negative.
At a recent conference on the educational autonomy of schools, organized by the CDS-PP of Cascais and where several directors of school groups and private schools were expected, Alexandre Homem Cristo exemplified some costs incurred from the “lockdown” when satisfied at an international level:
- Students in the Netherlands lost the equivalent of 8 weeks of learning, which corresponds to the period of forced confinement analyzed.
- 9-year-olds in the US recorded a 20-year regression in learning achievement. What these students learned in 2020, during the pandemic🇧🇷 it was the same as those who were the same age in 2000 had learned, with a significant setback in the evolution registered until 2019.
Despite the consensus understanding in the school community about the problems of adapting to the virtual school and despite the very relevant damage and the need to understand its effects, no public evaluation dedicated to the subject in Portugal has been published so far.
The Institute for Educational Assessment (IAVE) produced a limited report in 2021 (“Study Diagnosis of Learning – Presentation of Results”) which, in its introduction, leaves no doubt that the concern is not the delays in learning caused by the pandemic, but as possible differences between students due to the fact that the “teaching and learning process … was confronted with unknown and innovative situations that may have caused some disparities between students from different schools”. The problem for IAVE is not that students have delays in learning. The big problem is that not everyone is in the same situation. If they were all equally late, there is no reason for concern, from the perspective of the minister’s new educational policy.
Its authors demonstrate illiteracy when they add percentages of responses on different questions, which is statistically incorrect (see pages 10, 12 and 14 in the presentation of results). If IAVE performs its estimates by someone who does not master simple statistical concepts, can we rest assured about the reliability of its analyses?
Despite the absence of a proper diagnosis of the problems caused by the pandemic in education and schools not having access to a careful assessment of its effects, the ministry has foreseen the implementation of a learning recovery plan with the pompous name of “Plan 21| 23 School+”.
In 2022, in April and June, the ministry published two monitoring reports of this plan that simply ignored the effects on learning. They are just two more bureaucratic reports on the implementation of the measures, the type of analysis that the minister particularly likes because it contributes nothing to knowledge about the problems of education. Just consider whether schools are obeying your orders.
subsequently, the IAVE published a second report based on the benchmarking tests carried out this year (“Provas de Aferição do Ensino Basic 2022 National Results”). In this report, the conclusion is that there was an improvement compared to 2019, so the effects of the pandemic would be negligible and would have been lost over time. In practice, the report assumes that the learning recovery plan was sufficient and that the problem is resolved.
However, the assessment tests have a reduced value and a report that is based on them as well. Students know that these tests do not count for their assessment and therefore do not value them. I myself advise my children not to make too much of the subject, as it is of no use to them, telling them to concentrate on the tests that are important.
Even more concerned, a recovery plan that is based on the premise that there have been negative effects on student learning and seeks to resolve them is seen very differently from a plan based on the illusion that Portugal has evolved during the pandemic. The first is a serious case that tries to assess and resolve the harmful consequences of successive confinements. The second serves only to promote concern about the subject and confirm a preconceived idea.
The PISA report, published by the OECD, is consensually accepted as a good benchmark for assessing learning progress. Portugal has registered remarkable progress in the results obtained by its students between 2000 and 2015 in Reading, Mathematics and Science.
What is observed is that there is no lack of plans and reports. What is lacking is knowledge about reality. The consequence of not having a careful evaluation is that we still do not know the effects of the pandemic on the learning of Portuguese students. The minister has already publicly mentioned that there has been progress during the pandemic (contrary to the problems recognized in other countries), but does not present any evidence of this fact. Dignity is a guarantee for the success of your educational policy.
There are always international predictions that we protect ourselves from the inability of national evaluators and from political manipulation, and here comes the second example of the original policy educated by this minister.
The PISA report, published by the OECD, is consensually accepted as a good benchmark for assessing learning progress. Portugal has registered remarkable progress in the results obtained by its students between 2000 and 2015 in Reading, Mathematics and Science.
The results of tests carried out in 2018 appreciated the results of the new paradigm for educational policy brought by the current minister. Portuguese students’ scores dropped significantly in Reading and Science, and in the second case to a level below 2009, and remained unchanged in Mathematics. The Ministry of Education chose to ignore the results and preferred to devalue the PISA tests. This “innovative” position, in which results that do not like or are not manipulable are “erased”, marks a whole new educational approach to promoting education. Let’s see what news the next PISA results bring.
Other examples of this educational “excellence” are the persecution of the best students in Famalicão for refusing the ideological intoxication of “gender”, the prescription for private school students to access free school books, or the pedagogical novelty of works such as “Os Mayas” without the students having to read the book, being able to confine themselves to summaries.
Unfortunately, most parents don’t care about what goes on in schools, as they are more concerned with their daily chores and already accept it as a fatality, and some even with relief, to see their children go to live abroad.
A good educational policy could change something in our country if the announced decentralization and security of school autonomy were a reality. Portugal is one of the countries in Europe where schools have less autonomy and where decisions as simple as hiring a teacher are made to respond to the corporate “lobbies” of some teachers and not for the interest in better student learning and better functioning. of schools. We have already seen that this is not among the main concerns of the current minister’s educational policy. As long as it does, Portugal will continue to destroy its children’s education and future, and the economic costs and backwardness of the country will be the only things going forward.