"The LOE goes against public education," said this Thursday the spokesperson for STEC Intersindical Canarias, Francisco Morales, who believes that the Law promoted by the Zapatero Government, "sends money to private subsidized schools and allocates more budget to private education than governments of a conservative nature."
Although the Organic Law on Education was approved by Congress on April 6, the union is now beginning a campaign in the islands of the archipelago to gather 25,000 signatures from Canarian society, which they will present to the Ministry of Education, so "they see that our complaints are not gratuitous, but that we are supported by a broad social majority and by the entire educational community," says the union spokesperson. In Lanzarote, they hope to collect more than a thousand supports.
The union assures that public education in the Canary Islands lacks quality due to the poor management of the Government of the Canary Islands, which has the powers in the matter. "The autonomous government allocates less than 4% of the budget to Education, we are below the Spanish average, when it should reach 7%," declares the union spokesperson.
They denounce that the Canary Islands presents, according to the PISA 2003 report, commissioned to evaluate the level of the educational systems of the member countries of the European Union, one of the highest rates of school failure in all of Spain and the EU. "We are at the tail end of Spain and Europe in our level of education," said Francisco Morales.
They attribute this situation to the deficiencies that are felt every day in public education centers for children, primary and secondary schools. As explained by the spokesperson for ISTEC, the classrooms are overcrowded, "which makes it impossible to provide personalized attention to students," a situation that he says will worsen, since the new Law increases the ratio of students allowed in each class by 10%.
Teachers face problems of school coexistence. More and more students are arriving from other countries, socialized in their cultures of origin, to whom no language or customs training is offered in the community in which they are going to integrate, they affirm.
Three weeks ago, the Government signed the School Coexistence Plan, endowed with 4.5 billion euros to provide qualified personnel, such as social mediators and pedagogues, to educational centers. For the union, "it is an insufficient measure, that budget has to be distributed among more than 15,000 schools, how are they going to pay qualified personnel if they don't even pay the teachers who have to cover for other colleagues' absences?", they ask from the union.
The job insecurity of the 6,000 temporary teachers in the archipelago is one of the problems that plagues education in the Canary Islands. The coverage of absences of those teachers who are forced to take leave occurs slowly, harming their colleagues, who are overloaded with work, and the students, who stop receiving the necessary attention.
The campaign to collect signatures will begin next week in educational centers, on the street and through the internet, and will culminate at the end of next June, to present the desired 25,000 signatures in the meetings that the union will hold with the Government of the Canary Islands in the month of July.
