Madrid, between the territories of the European Union with greater school segregation
Education is very important in the development of every child. His training in the school environment gives him different skills with which he is making his way on his academic path, in addition to gaining skills in his future career. At this point, it is worth asking: do all minors have the same possibilities? Can they opt for the same Academic Offer?
The answer is no. In the field of education there is also segregation and in some territories not all children can access the same offer for economic and social reasons. An inequality that in Spain exceeds the average of the European Union and that Madrid has one of the territories with one of the highest rates in the whole continent in this sense.
The data of Spain against Europe
Student segregation and its comparison with the rest of Europe has been the subject of study of the Autonomous University of Madrid. An investigation that has taken into account the data of the PISA 2015 Report and in particular has stopped to evaluate the variable "index of the economic, social and cultural situation of the student family".
In this variable Those are considered data such as the international socioeconomic index of work situation (ISEI), highest educational level of the student's parents, index of family wealth, index of educational resources of the household, and index of possessions related to culture in the family home . From here, two measures have been established to measure segregation.
On the one hand, Gorard index that studies the proportion that represents the students of the minority group in a school with respect to how that minority group is represented in a specific geographical area (either at the level of autonomous community, country, district ...), and is interpreted as the rate of students who would have to change schools to achieve equal distribution.
It has also taken into account Isolation Index. This measure estimates the likelihood that a member of the minority group is in your school with another member of your same group. From both results it was possible to measure school segregation, which is very far from the data from the rest of Europe.
While Spain presents a school segregation index of 0,38, the average for Europe is 0.35. Only countries like Bulgaria (0.39), Slovakia (0.40), Czech Republic (0.40), Romania (0.41) and Hungary (0.46), have worse data than this country, although it should be noted that the educational level of these regions is lower than that presented by Spain.
Madrid, the Canary Islands and Catalonia, at the head
Within Spain, not all regions They present the same school segregation data. In concrete The Community of Madrid with 0.41 in the Gorard Index and 0.33 in the Isolation Index lead this ranking. They are followed by territories such as the Canary Islands, 0.36 and 0.32 and Catalonia, with 0.36 and 0.31.
On the contrary, territories with less segregation within Spain are the Balearic Islands, 0.27 and 0.25, La Rioja, 0.28 and 0.26, and Galicia, 0.29 and 0.27. Given this situation, the Autonomous University of Madrid warns of the risks of this situation which is one of the factors that contribute the most to preventing a true equality of opportunities.
Damián Montero
