Conflict of Interest

In an earlier post I noted that a former Vanguardia columnist, Eugeni Madueño, was behind a newly launched publishing venture, Edicions Clariana.  Clariana and by extension Madueño have produced more than one hundred pages of City of Barcelona colour inserts in La Vanguardia since early January. Yesterday's paper brought two such inserts: one published by Clariana, and one--the one-hundred page glossy Vivir en Vanguardia--by La Vanguardia itself. The latter looks like a magazine, yet there's nothing on the spine, and an ISBN rather than an ISSN; of only four pages of add copy, two were placed by the city hall. One of these two pages, the back cover, is simply the City of Barcelona logo magnified to 75% of the width of the page. That is, it nearly looks like an official publication. The editor? Eugeni Madueño. Madueño is both publishing for city hall and working for a paper with a mandate to cover city hall. Mr. Madueño would seem to be subject to a conflict of interest: he can't be expected to report objectively on a level of government which is paying him. Then again, it may be naive of me to expect a clean separation of the fourth estate from government.

Colours

Once upon a time, Barcelona Council advertised its presence thus:

That is, white lettering on turquoise stood for the municipal corportation. By 2006, at least one campaign had abandoned turquoise for red:

Since late 2010, many public building administered by Barcelona council have be rebranded to make the link more conspicuous:

One notices that white lettering on a red background carries the most important message content, and that every plaque carries with it an implicit good vibe (the letter 'B' and the Catalan for 'well' or 'good' are homophones). To what might we owe this new colour scheme? Just a suggestion:

What's Wrong with Catalan Schools? (III)

In the 2009 OECD Pisa Report, my home school system of Ontario scored 531 points for reading skills, with a fairly narrow spread between the lowest and the highest scores. Spain and Catalonia rated lower, as they did in mathematics, despite steady improvement across the 2003, 2006, and 2009 reports. (Scores for reading stood at  481 and 498, respectively.) Ontario schoolchildren spend sixteen more days at school per year than do their Catalan counterparts, which may go some way to explaining the difference in scores. My first question, then, is why there is no public debate in Catalan media about the number of contact hours as an aspect of education policy.

More worrying than overall scores is the shape of bell curve for Spanish reading scores. Consider this:

Click for a larger image.

Source: http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/81-590-x/2010001/tbl/tblb1.13-eng.htm

Reading scores are here broken down into six ranges. How many students score in the highest of these six ranges? In Ontario, it's 1.9%; in Spain, it's 0.2%. How many score in the two two ranges, Levels 5 and 6 together. In Ontario, it's 14.2%; in Spain, 3.4&. How many score in the top three ranges, Levels 4-6? In Ontario, it's 41.9%, in Spain, 21.2%. Spain catches up with the rest of the developed world with very healthy percentages in Levels 2 and 3--both of are tantamount to a passing mark--but does very poorly if one concentrates on students who are scoring particularly high. Numerically, Spain does a poor job at producing brilliant students. Thus my second question: Why?