Education is going to be one of the great workhorses of the current legislature. It has not been even a year since the defeat of the left in the elections of May 28 and the Platform in Defense of Public Education - which brings together teachers, associations of mothers and fathers and students - has already called for the next day 23 a strike of the entire educational community. The reasons: the "regressive policies" of the Valencian government and the future "educational freedom law" that PP and Vox have begun to process in the Valencian Courts and which, according to the organizing unions, are trying to "corner" Valencian in the classrooms.
Along these lines, today the Student Union has called a strike "to show its rejection of the Educational Freedom law registered by PP and VOX - which they consider an attack on the fundamental right of learning of the Valencian - reject the cuts to the budgets allocated to the rehabilitation and construction of public study centers and demand immediate solutions to the infrastructure and overcrowding problems that we suffer in public study centers throughout the Valencian Community.
Beyond the student protest this Thursday, the call for a strike on May 23, the first major union mobilization of the legislature, is presented in a climate of apparent social dialogue. The Social Dialogue Table made up of governors, businessmen and unions has met on up to three occasions at the Palau de la Generalitat. Although the music sounds good, the unions point out that "no progress has been made" and that "they are still waiting."
That does not mean, the same sources point out, that "there are sufficient reasons" to promote pressure measures in some sectors such as education or health. One thing is social dialogue, the will, and another is that daily operations do not cause tension, explain the unions that foresee more conflicts in the future.
In fact, this Tuesday there were already mobilizations in the health sector called by CCOO-PV, UGT-PV and Intersindical Valenciana for what they call forced mobility of macro areas and the 35-hour day. The next three weeks will also be protests, since the following three Tuesdays there are mobilizations called at the Ministry of Health, work centers and the Palau de la Generalitat.
At an educational level, the spark that lit the fire is the so-called educational freedom law that will allow the linguistic model to change in public centers. This has not yet been approved and must go through the amendment process. However, the Platform considers it necessary to "increase social pressure and raise public opinion so that the government stops implementing regressive educational policies that violate the rights of the educational community and pervert the meaning of the word freedom."
The Minister of Education, José Antonio Rovira, after learning of the announcement of the strike, regretted that the greatest victims of this protest will be the students and asked himself "what the organizers have against freedom." The head of Education yesterday defended his department's decision to recover numerical grades, increase the hours of mathematics, facilitate the choice of center with the single district and that families can choose the base language in which their children study.
A very different story from that written by the unions that demand "the necessary resources for true educational inclusion; the improvement of the working and salary conditions of teaching workers, among others, paid increases; the reduction of teaching hours for teachers over 55 years of age; the suppression of bureaucracy; the increase in staff and a general reduction in ratios; and putting an end to overcrowding, aggression and conflict to which no solution is given."
They also criticize the paralysis of the Pla Edificant, which the opposition parties have echoed, and "the cuts in the Official Language Schools", which the minister defended yesterday alleging that the left had "set up a network of EOI that They don't even have them in Catalonia", which has more inhabitants than the Valencian Community.
Two very different ways of understanding the educational model that will collide on May 23. A confrontation that does not bother Minister Rovira, who already knew, when he was appointed, that the position of head of Education in a PP government is one of the most difficult.
