From constructive discrimination to the change of grades as a result of Celaá Law: the difficulty of the Quetzal Route to decide on the contributors | Spain | EUROtoday

Choosing the contributors of the Quetzal Route by means of the ESO common grade of three° has turn out to be a headache for Íñigo de la Quadra-Salcedo. A 12 months in the past, he was confronted with having to decrease the common grade cut-off for boys who took the decision and, thus, compensate for the distribution of locations by intercourse. If that 12 months he had maintained the choice system by grade with none sort of constructive discrimination for them, ultimately 87% of the 200 locations on the Quetzal Route would have been for the women, who had higher grades. Having overcome the commotion that that call brought about, De la Quadra-Salcedo has spent the final 12 months designing a good and uncontroversial name that will assure a minimal quota for both intercourse and keep away from the complications of 2023. But, when it was in That course of, the final stage of implementation of Lomloe, the state instructional legislation accredited in 2020, was launched and a brand new downside arose: the autonomous communities specific the {qualifications} otherwise relying on whether or not or not they apply the state legislation. Once once more, he had to make use of his ingenuity to pick the youngsters who this summer time will get pleasure from this new Quetzal Route.

While areas such because the Valencian Community or Castilla La Mancha, which implement the complete Lomloe, give qualitative grades with phrases starting from “Insufficient (IN)”, the bottom, to “Outstanding (SB), the highest; others like Galicia and Madrid only follow the numerical scale from 1 to 10, by not applying the law. The result? Chaos for the organizer of the Quetzal Route when making the lists to select students based on the average grade of 3rd in ESO, the only requirement that has been taken into account between 2022 and 2024. Although it has managed to To navigate that disparity between communities this year, it now has a few months to come up with a new system for selecting participants in 2025.

De la Quadra-Salcedo has taken a risk to revive the Quetzal Route, a project started by his father, the adventurer and journalist Miguel de la Quadra-Salcedo, in 1979, and which had its last edition in 2016, when the ideologue of Everything and the BBVA bank then decided to withdraw financing from a program that required 1.5 million euros each year to provide scholarships to the boys and girls who attended. The Quetzal Route, which also bore the name Adventure 92, took dozens of young people on expeditions through Spain and American countries to discover the history of Latin America and its natural treasures. The young people also received training in arts, sports, music, astronomy, biology, archeology and other disciplines that strengthened their profiles. In 2022, Íñigo de la Quadra-Salcedo took up the project with a lot of effort with a more modest proposal: a route through Galicia sponsored by the Xunta. In this new stage of the project, De la Quadra-Salcedo decided to select the participants, who have all expenses paid by a scholarship, through average grades and a quota established for each autonomous community.

For the 2023 call, the first challenge was the clear superiority of the candidates' qualifications. In the rules of the 2024 call, she resolved this by guaranteeing that each community had no less than 30% representation of either sex. In the 2024 edition, 985 young people have applied, of which 27.3% were boys, for the 200 places offered for a route that will go this year through Galicia, Extremadura and Portugal. The rule was fulfilled and for the trip, which will begin on June 29 and end on July 12, there will be 70% girls and 30% boys. But the really difficult part of the selection, however, has been the change in the expression of Lomloe grades in eight of the 17 autonomous communities, basically because some apply it and others do not.

The new state education law has established that evaluation must focus on meeting objectives and competencies and has opted for a qualitative system instead of one by numbers. In the case of ESO, it is Royal Decree 217/2022 that regulates how grades are expressed. Although the Ministry of Education assures that this Royal Decree is mandatory for all autonomous communities, the reality is that it is applied unevenly. So, what is done in calls like this, when each student arrives with a different transcript depending on which community they study in?

For the communities that do apply the qualitative system, the route organizer translated the “Outstanding (SB)” into a ten – with out distinguishing whether or not the coed had gotten a 9 or a ten – and the “Notable (NT)” right into a 8. “If we give everyone 'Outstanding' a 10, we are increasing the grade of those who would have a 9 and we are not valuing the effort they make to the correct extent. But there is no option,” says De la Quadra-Salcedo, who confesses that “it has been a double-edged sword.” What occurred then is that a number of candidates from these communities with Lomloe had a ten and the one means out was to interrupt the tie by drawing tons. “Never on the Quetzal Route have we had to break ties with so many 10s,” admits De la Quadra-Salcedo. For instance, within the Valencian Community 30 ladies had a ten, the results of translating the “Outstanding” in that quantity, and there have been solely 14 locations for them. So, these 14 locations needed to be drawn. “Some parents were upset that it ended up being decided by lottery,” says the expedition coordinator, “all of this has been gibberish. But even so, we know that the best are coming.”

However, De La Quadra-Salcedo wonders if the issue he has had will occur in different tutorial classes. In precept, for entry to the University there could be no downside, as a result of all through Spain the numerical grade is utilized in Baccalaureate programs. In any case, the Ministry of Education explains that in calls and admission processes the place college students' tutorial information are evaluated, it’s as much as the convening entities or organizations to determine the way to convert the qualitative grades to a numerical scale. If scores needed to be laid out in processes of entry to intermediate-level coaching cycles, provides Education, Royal Decree 659/2023 establishes the protocol: “When there is no numerical qualification, it will be carried out according to the following criteria: Insufficient (IN), 3; Enough (SU), 5; Good (BI), 6; Notable (NT),7.5; and Outstanding (SB), 9. In the event of a tie, the administrations will regulate the ordering criteria.”

On the Quetzal Route facet, in the meantime, there are already some concepts for the bases of the 2025 name. De la Quadra-Salcedo is contemplating requesting grades not just for third ESO, but in addition for 1st and 2nd , to common, and likewise keep in mind different candidate components. “Maybe we'll see if they develop other activities in the world of music, sports or the arts,” she provides. When his father led the expedition, these chosen earned their place by getting ready a written or musical work that was evaluated by the Complutense University of Madrid. But her son doesn’t see it viable to return to that mannequin. “There was a risk that the students would not do the work themselves. Sometimes we found that the parents made them. That's why I thought about the average grade, because there was no trick there,” she says. But, now, the truth that every neighborhood applies Lomloe or not pushes the Quetzal Route to decide on its expeditioners by means of different standards past a quantity.

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