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  • Desescalada. Eight autonomies organize the return to school without attending to the 'Celaá plan

Only three autonomous communities - Catalonia , Andalusia and Castilla y León - have counted and made public the number of additional teachers who are going to hire the next course to reinforce classes in the face of the threat of Covid-19. Given the requirement for September to keep 1.5 meters away from students , it is imperative to find new learning spaces, which forces groups to be divided and more teachers to be taught. But most regional governments sneak out of hires that take close to 80%of the educational budget. "The authorities are not taking it seriously and there is no other solution than to have more staff. An urgent hiring plan for teachers is needed," says Clara Eugenia Núñez , professor of History and Economic Institutions at UNED and former director general of Universities and Research of the Community of Madrid between 2003 and 2009.

Clara Eugenia Núñez is the coordinator of the Education and Science Commission of the Mixed Work Group Covid-19 that has constituted the Foundation for Studies in Applied Economics (Fedea) . This group, to which 18 educational experts belong, has just finished a document with proposals for the Government and the Autonomous Communities with a view to managing the pandemic next school year. It calls for an extraordinary massive recruitment of teachers to reactivate employment and improve the social prestige of this profession. The way of contracting involves removing the entire civil service system. Because "it is not about hiring interns or those who have suspended the oppositions, but putting the best in their field," says the professor.

The document proposes, on the one hand, to select for teachers not those who have completed a degree in Education, but graduates from other disciplines with the best academic records from the last academic years. That is, among the 5% of students with the highest marks in careers such as Mathematics , Physics , Chemistry , Science , Biology or History .

On the other hand, it proposes to recycle and convert into secondary school teachers professionals with work experience and "proven linguistic or mathematical skills" who have become unemployed or are in an ERTE due to the Covid-19 crisis. They would be engineers, architects, journalists or young scientists who have a teaching vocation, even if they have not completed the enabling master's degree. They would be given a pedagogical training course, they would be instructed in the use of digital platforms and they would be put to carry out support tasks in schools that voluntarily wanted to take part in this project.

Inspired by Start by Educating

The idea, which breaks with all the schemes of the current Spanish teaching career, is inspired by the Teach for All network , which for decades has transformed renowned professionals into teachers and has taught them in marginal neighborhoods. The project that began in the USA in 1989 is already present in fifty countries (in Spain, in a very minority under the name of Empieza por Educar) and its results have been very positive. Although they have not been without controversy because it has been widely questioned whether they are trained enough to teach in such complicated environments.

Experts such as Julio Carabaña , Alicia Delibes , Mercedes Esteban , Jorge Calero , José Adolfo de Azcarraga , Florentino Felgueroso or Francisco Pérez propose in the Educational System, formation of human capital, science and research after the Covid-19 an emergency educational plan from July to December 2020 and a medium-term plan to reinforce and renew the body of teachers and compulsory education teachers.

This staff of additional teachers would help teachers to better organize themselves in the cases and could work "immediately, 15 days after the emergency plan was launched." Because the objective is to open the schools to teach these months to the students with the most needs in order to reduce the so-called summer effect , an educational delay generated during the long school holidays -students will be six months without face-to-face classes- especially affecting the most disadvantaged.

The first measure would be to identify the educational centers with the most students at risk of exclusion, select a leader for each area that groups together a certain number of schools and is in charge of organizing support for teachers. Next, new teachers will be selected and trained.

"The program should be considered public investment with positive effects on employment and economic activity in the medium term," says the report, which warns that "the Covid-19 crisis will generate high unemployment which, in the area of education coincides with a period of contraction of the Primary and Secondary teachers 'and professors' bodies as a consequence of the aging of the workforce and the massive retirements of all those hired in the 1980s. "

Fewer school holidays

In addition to opening summer schools for students in need and recruiting these teachers, they propose lowering the ratios, teaching the outdoors, suspending sports and group activities and concentrating the curriculum on the "most important subjects".

In the medium term, they plan to increase teaching hours by extending the school period and reducing summer vacations. And there are two very relevant issues: raising the grade to enter the Teaching career by putting a numerus clausus system as in Medicine to attract only the best and renew the curriculum of these studies and modify the content of the master's degree that enables teaching because "a theoretical teaching disconnected from the reality of the classroom prevails".

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