If education is in such a state, why does nobody dare to put it right?

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Felipe J. de Vicente Algueró

In recent years, an ever-growing number of journalists, intellectuals and opinion-formers have noted the deterioration of the education system. Assessment tests, the constant clamour from teachers and the available empirical evidence are all sufficiently forceful to conclude—beyond any doubt—that things are not going well in our classrooms. It is equally evident, however, that politicians are doing nothing about it. In the part of the country where the situation is arguably at its worst, Catalonia, and despite a change of government, the new team at the Department of Education has not altered so much as a comma in the regulations governing the system, except when compelled to do so by a court ruling. As for the central government, the LOMLOE was not passed to address educational problems; there was not even an attempt at a prior diagnostic exercise. The law was pushed through under cover of the pandemic’s restrictions. The outcome is a statute whose sole purpose is to impose a particular pedagogical and political ideology.

If only the second law of thermodynamics could be applied here, we might glimpse a solution: entropy increases, disorder mounts. But no—Physics is of no use to us. We must turn instead to Economics. The so-called Public Choice School provides an answer. Its founder, Nobel laureate James Buchanan, was joined by leading figures such as Gordon Tullock and Mancur Olson. It is above all Olson’s The Logic of Collective Action that offers the key to understanding what is happening—and it is his argument that I follow here.

Before introducing the Public Choice approach, let us offer a preliminary observation—focused on Catalonia, but readily extrapolated to other regions. When the Generalitat of Catalonia was first established, the Department of Education was located in a small office in the Palau on Plaça de Sant Jaume. Shortly afterwards it moved to modest premises nearby on Carrer Sant Honorat. It soon grew, scattering its services across Barcelona before converging first on a grand building on Avinguda Diagonal—which proved too small—and later on the equally imposing headquarters it now occupies on Via Augusta, formerly IBM’s premises. At the same time, the Department’s peripheral services multiplied. There are now nine regional offices and a long list of affiliated bodies: School Councils (Consejos Escolares), the Agency for Educational Evaluation and Foresight (Agencia de Evaluación y Prospectiva de la Educación), the Agency for Vocational Training and Professional Qualification (Agencia de Formación y Cualificación Profesional), three secretariats, nine directorates-general and a whole array of deputy directorates and service heads. In sum, an overwhelming bureaucracy. And that is without counting the educational bureaucracies of provincial councils and town halls. If you did not quite grasp the meaning of “educational foresight”, do not worry—those who conceived the idea likely do not understand it either. Yet here they are, the prospectologists, a subspecies of pedagogue somewhere between the I Ching and ChatGPT.

How did this bureaucracy come into being? It had to be created from scratch. The first occupants of those ever larger and more comfortable offices were hand-picked according to three criteria: loyalty to the ruling party, adherence to the pedagogical doctrines then being imposed and little inclination to teach in the classroom. These early bureaucrats, drawn from secondary schools and Faculties of Education, expanded their ranks by recruiting people who shared their interests and ideological profile. One might say that a fully-fledged pedagocracy took shape—securely ensconced, well-paid and self-perpetuating. It scarcely matters who the Minister is. They are the ones who wield real power. Full stop.

This is precisely where Public Choice analysis proves enlightening. These economists begin from two basic premises:

1. Voters do not cast their ballots on the basis of a detailed analysis of public policy. The reason is simple: implicitly or explicitly, voters discount the idea that their individual vote could be decisive in an election involving so many participants. Voters are generally unorganised. For instance, there is no powerful, broad-based movement of voters prioritising educational policy and influencing others.
2. Political decisions are not driven by disinterested concern for the common good; they are shaped by interest groups. Bureaucracies organise themselves as interest groups in which each individual seeks to maximise—and demonstrate the necessity of—their position.

Such groups are far more organised and cohesive than the mass of voters, giving them far greater influence over political decisions. In our case, the pedagocrats—the bureaucrats of the Department, Faculties of Education and related foundations and organisations—can achieve their aims through lobbying, pressing politicians to adopt policies that benefit their members, even when those policies do not serve the public interest. The pedagogy they promote is, by definition, the public interest. If anyone attempts to reduce the pedagogical bureaucracy, they are instantly met with the inquisitorial accusation of wanting to cut education, undermine the welfare state and—worst of all—serve as agents of the neoliberal conspiracy to dismantle education. Once that word is invoked, the argument is as good as won. Which politician is willing to risk being branded a neoliberal? And so, everything carries on as before, with the pedagocracy firmly entrenched.

If the reader has patience (and a great deal is required), they may read Jaume Trilla’s three laborious articles in El Diario de la Educación—a publication that describes itself as a journal for “educational resistance”—on pedagogism. Should one manage to read these fervent defences of the pedagocracy without giving up the ghost, one will discover that his theses perfectly illustrate what has just been described. When Professor Trilla must resort to ad hominem arguments, references to the far right and other niceties of comparable intellectual rigour, suggests that the poor man is more distressed than the Titanic’s plumber.

Another example is the DIME collective (Teachers for Inclusion and Educational Improvement), which identifies educational improvement—that is, the public interest—with its own proposals. One of its main lines of action is the “defence of Pedagogy, Didactics and, more generally, the Educational Sciences and related disciplines”, among other bits and pieces. Perhaps we might rephrase this more realistically: the defence of pedagogues, didacticians and Education Faculty staff.

Public Choice economists have studied in detail the mechanisms through which bureaucracies—and thus inefficient public spending—grow. Because bureaucratic activities (in this case, pedagogical ones) are not evaluated on a cost-benefit basis, there is an inevitable tendency towards uncontrolled increases in costs and deficits, the continuous expansion of functional macro-structures and the proliferation of bureaucratic bodies. In Catalonia, an analysis of educational spending shows that the bureaucratic component has grown proportionally more than the resources reaching the classroom. Were market criteria applied, the people responsible for such a poor product—the education system—would have been dismissed long ago. Yet there they remain, firmly entrenched in defence of a model of governance they claim is in the public interest.

To justify their posts, pedagogocrats tend to propagate bureaucracy, inundating schools with administrative processes, reports, forms, evaluations and a long list of other requirements that are unnecessary in themselves but indispensable if their positions are to remain secure. The bureaucratic shockwave consumes a great many hours of teachers’ time—at the expense of their primary task—or creates small, school-level versions of the pedagocracy (coordination roles not directly linked to teaching). Pedagogocrats delight in multiplying regulations and instructions: the Secretariat for Educational Improvement alone has four directorates-general, three deputy directorates and an agency, supported by numerous heads of service, deputy heads, advisers and collaborators—all of which contribute not to educational improvement, but to its decline.

Inefficient structures proliferate within the pedagocracy. Is the secondary-school teaching master’s genuinely useful or necessary, or is it simply another mechanism for providing salaries to more pedagogocrats? Doctors do not complete a master’s degree to practise; they spend four years learning alongside accredited professionals in public hospitals. But if future teachers trained directly in schools, what would become of the Faculties of Education?

A few examples of the make-work posts created in Catalonia: the Coordinator for Coexistence and Pupil Well-being (Coordinador de Convivencia y Bienestar del Alumnado), known by the curious acronym COCOBE (coexistence is something that concerns all teachers, not a single coordinator, and speaking of pupil well-being is something of a joke when it is the teachers who are decidedly unwell); the Mathematics Programme Mentors (Mentores de programas de matemáticas) (why on earth are such mentors needed when schools already have specialist teachers in the subject?). The crowning touch is a programme called SENSEI, a Japanese word used for instructors of martial arts and other kinds of “masters”. Under this programme, novice teachers are to be assigned a “sensei”: a sort of spiritual guide—pedagocrat, of course—kimono unconfirmed. All these posts come with webinars, seminars, training courses… all of which help to line the pockets of yet more pedagocrats. One can only marvel at how fertile these people are when it comes to reproducing themselves.

I spent eleven years on Spain’s National School Council. I owe taxpayers an apology for having funded my travel and accommodation in Madrid to attend meetings alongside nearly a hundred members who likewise received allowances. The Council (and, I imagine, its regional counterparts) is entirely dispensable unless it undergoes thorough reform. We never once held a serious debate on the country’s educational problems. Not even a minimal, objective and independent diagnosis. The opinion on an organic law is dispatched in a single—and very intense—morning. Opinions are approved not on technical grounds but by majority vote. A proposal passes if it receives more ayes than noes, regardless of whether it is useful or futile; some are mere gestures, others even unconstitutional. And they serve no purpose whatsoever, being purely consultative (thank goodness). Each member votes according to the interest group they represent (union, association, collective…). Only the twelve “distinguished individuals”—among whom I found myself, presumably by error—and who were not appointed by any organised group, voted freely. During those brisk sessions—where one went chiefly to vote and scarcely to debate—I realised just how right the Public Choice economists are.

Source: educational EVIDENCE

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