The “depressions” that have crossed the country in recent weeks have had natural effects on the school network. In addition to the damage caused, they revealed the extent to which we have a more than dual education in terms of the conditions in which students, teaching and non-teaching staff work. This results from the asymmetrical, casuistic and disjointed way in which investments are made and resources are allocated (in the English language of Economist) in the public education network, navigating according to the programs of the moment, especially those that allow attracting European funds.
If it is evident that with extreme weather phenomena it is impossible to avoid a certain level of damage, it is no less true that it is ridiculous that, after the pharaonic investment made in Parque Escolar, we have schools that were intervened a few years ago and saw pavilion roofs flying and roofs falling, like at Escola Secundária da Moita, where I was a student and started as a teacher.
With some humor, a student said that, even before Kristin’s depression, every day is a surprise, and you don’t know what will stop working. But like this, there are dozens or hundreds of cases across the country.
A country in which it is possible, however, to continue to find very large investments in school equipment, namely in the so-called CTE (Specialized Technological Centers), financed by the aforementioned European funds in amounts that reach close to 500 million euros. This is certainly invaluable and necessary to ensure quality Education, if the equipment is effectively used and its maintenance and updating is ensured, just as it is essential that the schools that receive it are in a position to use it properly, instead of accumulating it in improvised storage rooms or in rooms that remain deactivated.
The problem is that we have no guarantee of effective monitoring of the application and return of this investment, as well as we had very poor monitoring of the Parque Escolar works, about which the Court of Auditors raised successive questions. Just as there are no guarantees that, with the decentralization of competences that the management of the entire Basic Education school network and a large part of the Secondary School network passed to local authorities, there are equitable conditions at a financial level to ensure that increasingly notorious inequalities do not worsen.
It is no longer about any opposition/divergence between the conditions of public and private education, but rather the option to deregulate, calling it “flexibility” or, even more hypocritically, “autonomy” or “proximity management”, the public education network, abdicating any concern for social justice. Deregulatory experiments of this type have had bad results abroad, even though here we have decision-makers concerned with hiding it.
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