The Catalan school system has three tiers: state/public schools compete directly with publicly funded independent schools, which compete in their turn, more obliquely, with entirely private schools. The independent schools are not authorised to charge tuition, but do.
Three tiers means that greater public funding goes to public schools, from which the greatest uniformity is expected (though some experimentation is allowed). Independent schools are in less of a straight-jacket--for example, single sex schools receive public funding--but share few resources and they do not work as a network. Special programmes are specific to one school, and few schools can have the numbers to set up enriched math, English, or French classes. Consequently, grouping by ability is, like specialisation, almost impossible, and it is left to private schools--and, socially, to the rich--the pursue enriched curricula from which many more students could benefit.
28 September 2010
12 September 2010
What's Wrong with Catalan Schools? (I)
Stuyvesant High School, founded in lower Manhattan in 1904, has graduated four future Nobel laureates, as well as the Attorney General of the United States. The Bronx High School of Science (1938) boasts seven Nobel-winning alumni, and the Brooklyn Technical High School (1922) two. All three schools are public. None charges tuition. All are selective, basing admission on an entrance examination. All thirteen Nobel prizes were in science or economics. In the same period, seven Nobel prizes have been awarded to Spaniards, five of them to writers. In science, then, three New York City public high schools with a student population of under 11,000 have out-produced a country of over forty million by a factor of six.
There is limited specialisation in Catalan secondary schools, available to students aged 16-18. It is not selective. There are no entrance examinations. Admission to programmes emphasising music and drama entail can be based on auditions, but is otherwise based on across-the-board academic standards. It is not a student applies for admission to university, and thus to a specific major or concentration, that the link between academic merit and the right to walk through a specific set of doors every weekday morning appears.
In publicly funded education, then, students are grouped by area of residence (which often means socio-economic grouping) and in accordance with their parents' religious, linguistics, and ideological preferences. The gifted are not segregated for so much as half a day per week, though legislation requires that they receive special attention, and academic achievement is not rewarded by more challenging work and brighter, more dedicated schoolmates. Elitism is left to the private sector. It shouldn't be.
There is limited specialisation in Catalan secondary schools, available to students aged 16-18. It is not selective. There are no entrance examinations. Admission to programmes emphasising music and drama entail can be based on auditions, but is otherwise based on across-the-board academic standards. It is not a student applies for admission to university, and thus to a specific major or concentration, that the link between academic merit and the right to walk through a specific set of doors every weekday morning appears.
In publicly funded education, then, students are grouped by area of residence (which often means socio-economic grouping) and in accordance with their parents' religious, linguistics, and ideological preferences. The gifted are not segregated for so much as half a day per week, though legislation requires that they receive special attention, and academic achievement is not rewarded by more challenging work and brighter, more dedicated schoolmates. Elitism is left to the private sector. It shouldn't be.
08 September 2010
What's Wrong With This Picture?
Yesterday Mr Montilla called an election. Today's Vanguardia leads with the election call:
Yet at the end of the op-ed pages, a full colour-illustrated spread sells the speed, safety and toll-free status of the Catalan highway system:
And:
So what's wrong with this picture? On the very day of an election call, with the prospect of voting near, tax money has been spent to tell voters that those governing are good governors and deserve to go on governing, which entails voting for them. There is no cynical asperity, I hope, in pointing out the cynicism of the manoeuvre, the ill service that it does to democracy, the waste, and the imbecile rapacity of the political calculus which it presupposes.
Yet at the end of the op-ed pages, a full colour-illustrated spread sells the speed, safety and toll-free status of the Catalan highway system:
And:
So what's wrong with this picture? On the very day of an election call, with the prospect of voting near, tax money has been spent to tell voters that those governing are good governors and deserve to go on governing, which entails voting for them. There is no cynical asperity, I hope, in pointing out the cynicism of the manoeuvre, the ill service that it does to democracy, the waste, and the imbecile rapacity of the political calculus which it presupposes.
07 September 2010
Bell, California
Might Barcelona be better served by its newspapers than Los Angeles, whose metropolitan area more than doubles that of Barcelona in population? Los Angeles has one metropolitan daily; Barcelona has four. The L.A. Times daily circulation comes to over 600,000, relative to a local population (that of L.A. County) of nearly 10 million. The four Barcelona dailies--La Vanguardia (235,000), El Periódico (180,000), Avui (37,000), and El Punt (30,000)--give Barcelona three quarters the number of daily newspapers in circulation as Los Angeles in absolute terms, relative to a local population of 5.5 million in the province of Barcelona. To the figure for the L.A. Times one would have to add both the L.A. circulation of USA Today and dailies that target smaller markets within the country, such as the L.A. Daily News and La Opinión. Similarly, for Barcelona one would have too add the circulation of a half dozen Madrid dailies which publish Barcelona sections or supplements in their local editions.
This issue suggested itself when, in L.A. County, the Times blew the whistle on city officials in Bell, a municipality of about 36,000 to the south and east of downtown. Like Lester Freamon of The Wire, two Times journalists followed a paper trail: what they found was a +$1.5-million salary, a string of +$400,000 salaries, and a political clique that had been lining its collective pocket as best it could for six years. Obfuscation and loopholes had kept citizens in the dark. A print medium did its job, found the dirt, ran the exposé, and heads--a lot of heads--began to roll. The city is now run by an interim administration.
Perhaps a dozen place names in L.A. County are familiar to movie-goers all over the world. Bell is not among them. Bell is poor, largely Hispanic, and prone to lower voter turnouts: 400 people voted in a plebiscite which gave the now disgraced officials the loophole they needed to circumvent state law and get rich quick. Now that transparency and accountability have returned to Bell, they key question is why they were absent for so long.
The classic source of scrutiny in a liberal democracy is the press. In Bell, it took the press six years to expose the rot. Would it have taken as long in a two-, three- or four-newspaper town? A paper like the L.A. Times is far less reliant on public-sector advertising than one like La Vanguardia, but does that matter if the ratio of print media resources to population shrinks to such an extent that beats are not covered? There's a reason why the final season of The Wire was set in the Baltimore Sun newsroom: newspapers are to democracy what canaries are in a mine. If they die off, the oxygen is going. Even if Spanish papers sometimes read like mouthpieces for political parties of factions thereof, at least they compete, and their investigative resources, if trained on the idealogical enemy, are at least engaged and productive. If public money keeps more papers going, could it be a good thing? Is subsidised Barcelona better off than L.A.?
This issue suggested itself when, in L.A. County, the Times blew the whistle on city officials in Bell, a municipality of about 36,000 to the south and east of downtown. Like Lester Freamon of The Wire, two Times journalists followed a paper trail: what they found was a +$1.5-million salary, a string of +$400,000 salaries, and a political clique that had been lining its collective pocket as best it could for six years. Obfuscation and loopholes had kept citizens in the dark. A print medium did its job, found the dirt, ran the exposé, and heads--a lot of heads--began to roll. The city is now run by an interim administration.
Perhaps a dozen place names in L.A. County are familiar to movie-goers all over the world. Bell is not among them. Bell is poor, largely Hispanic, and prone to lower voter turnouts: 400 people voted in a plebiscite which gave the now disgraced officials the loophole they needed to circumvent state law and get rich quick. Now that transparency and accountability have returned to Bell, they key question is why they were absent for so long.
The classic source of scrutiny in a liberal democracy is the press. In Bell, it took the press six years to expose the rot. Would it have taken as long in a two-, three- or four-newspaper town? A paper like the L.A. Times is far less reliant on public-sector advertising than one like La Vanguardia, but does that matter if the ratio of print media resources to population shrinks to such an extent that beats are not covered? There's a reason why the final season of The Wire was set in the Baltimore Sun newsroom: newspapers are to democracy what canaries are in a mine. If they die off, the oxygen is going. Even if Spanish papers sometimes read like mouthpieces for political parties of factions thereof, at least they compete, and their investigative resources, if trained on the idealogical enemy, are at least engaged and productive. If public money keeps more papers going, could it be a good thing? Is subsidised Barcelona better off than L.A.?
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