In the Canary Islands, those who deserve it pass the University entrance exam (EBAU) and with the grade they deserve. This is a truth that everyone, inside and outside the Islands, must be clear about. As Minister of Education and Universities of the Government of the Canary Islands, I cannot fail to speak publicly in the face of what amounts to a disqualification of the Islands' education system and the questioning of the honesty or, at least, the professional worth of the university and high school teachers of the islands.
I am referring to statements such as those made by Ciudadanos to present a PNL asking for the unification of university entrance exams throughout Spain, criticizing that in the Canary Islands the average obtained is higher than in Castilla y León, when the Islands obtain worse results according to the PISA report. These comparisons, where incomparable concepts are mixed, are nothing more than a sign of profound demagoguery and lack of respect for the students of the Canary Islands, who work very hard to prepare for the tests, and, above all, for the teachers who coordinate and evaluate them.
It is demagoguery to relate the data from the PISA report to the EBAU, and it is because it relates two tests that do not have a single point in common:
1.- The EBAU is a curricular (content) evaluation, while PISA is competence-based (mathematical, reading comprehension and scientific skills).
2.- The EBAU is based on Spanish and regional legislation, while PISA does not take into account the curricular characteristics of the country's education system.
3.- In PISA, students participate according to their age (between 15 years and 3 months, and 16 years and 2 months), regardless of the course in which they are enrolled, while in the EBAU, only those who have previously passed the Baccalaureate participate voluntarily.
Therefore, there is a significant percentage of students who participate in PISA and who do not take the EBAU, which would already be a sufficient factor to demonstrate the demagoguery involved in linearly linking the results of one test and the other.
As that political formation knows -or should know-, the Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport establishes, through an annual Ministerial Order, the characteristics, design and content of the EBAU, as well as the maximum dates for its completion. This order includes the specification matrices that establish the concretion of the evaluable learning standards, which are indicated in the state curricular regulations of the stage, associated with the content blocks. The tests must include at least 70% of the standards in these matrices, and may be completed with other curricular standards. In other words, it is the State that sets a minimum for the tests at the state level, which must be contemplated by all the Autonomous Communities and, in the case of completing that minimum, everything must be referenced to the state curricular regulations.
Therefore, there is already a high degree of uniformity and concretion in the test and, if what this PNL is looking for is a new recentralization of Education in an autonomous State like ours, they will find us head-on.
But the most serious thing is, without a doubt, that it is even insinuated that there is some kind of agreement between all the university and high school teachers who design, apply and correct the tests in the Canary Islands, so that the students of the Islands obtain better grades than the rest. It is an inadmissible statement because of the accusation it represents for employees of the Administration and the Universities and completely wrong.
We do not know if, in order to seek support in a certain autonomous community, Ciudadanos considers it lawful to discredit what is done in others, but declarations in that sense are certainly not acceptable, even from its representatives in the Canary Islands, pointing out and emphasizing the negative data of the Islands and giving a public image of our education system that bears little resemblance to reality.
To these people who enter into undesirable comparisons, it is only necessary to remind them that there are always figures that they may not like in the same sense. I regret that they have put Castilla y León, with whose Government we maintain magnificent relations, as harmed in this comparison, but we must point out that the Canary Islands, between 2009 and 2015, the last year for which data is available, was the autonomous community that most improved its results in PISA. In fact, we went up 17 points in Mathematics, 35 in reading comprehension and 23 in Science. The Spanish average was 3, 15 and 5 and that of Castilla y León, 4, 19 and 4.
But not only that, when it comes to making comparisons that have nothing to do with it, in Castilla y León the early school dropout rate at the end of 2017 was the same as in 2015. In the Canary Islands, we lowered the rate by 4.4 percentage points.
If we take into account that numerous students who did the PISA study in 2015 reached the age to take the EBAU in 2017, that in these two years the improvement, evolution and greater interest in the study of Canary Islands students is demonstrated and that the parameters of the islands improve to a greater level, we could also affirm in a linear way that things are done much better here than in other communities and that as a result of this great boost to Education in the Islands, the people who come to take the EBAU exam do so with better preparation than in other places.
But we do not affirm it because it is not the custom of this counselor, nor of this Government, to speak from superfluous arguments, extracted at a glance from press publications and, above all, with a segregating desire, when our primary objective in the education system is integration, equity and inclusion.
Soledad Monzón Cabrera, Minister of Education and Universities of the Government of the Canary Islands