A study by the Higher Council for Scientific Research (CSIC) has detected a certain degree of discrimination, by Catholic schools in Spain, in the procedures to school students of foreign origin. CSIC researchers sent 5,000 fictitious admission requests, with Spanish and foreign names, and have analyzed the answers. In lay schools, the study has not found “difference in treatment” in the face of these requests. Yes there has been, on the other hand, by “Catholic schools or with some link with the Catholic Church,” as one of the authors of the study, Héctor Cebolla, on a day in Barcelona on the situation of the Moroccan community in Spain organized by the Itran Association, has revealed on Tuesday.
The public institution launched a “large -scale” project to know what happens in the preschoolization processes of the immigrant population. The CSIC sent fictitious requests to private schools from all over Spain for children from 0 to 5 years; Half of them, approximately, with names that could clearly be identified as foreign students. In the case of Moroccans, for example, “the most common male and female names” were used in that country, explained onion.
Financed by the European Commission in a program to identify patterns of ethnic discrimination, the study has effectively found “negative signs” in relation to two groups: the Senegalese and the Moroccans, always by schools in some way linked to the Church or, even if they are not explicitly religious, with “Catholic identity”. The CSIC has studying cases in which there has been no response and also those in which there have been (positive, negative or neutral). The conclusion is that a Moroccan or Senegalese citizen has 5% more probability of not obtaining any response or receiving a vague or little conclusive answer.
With artificial intelligence tools, the CSIC will now analyze the language used in the answers to verify, in the same way, if there is a different treatment between foreigners and Spanish. Another circumstances that the study shows is that homosexual couples have up to 15% more likely to obtain a faster and more positive response.
-Discrimination, insists onion in conversation with this newspaper, is “slight”, in line with what have so far shown similar studies applied in other areas, such as work. The bias in the response of religious schools is produced to a greater extent, in more rural areas and in poorest places. Or, according to the parameters of the study, in “the census sections that have prices per lower square meter”, which are precisely the places with the most presence of a population of foreign origin, more vulnerable.
In addition to these initial obstacles in access to education, CSIC’s analysis has concluded that, for immigrant students, early childhood education “gives worse results.” Foreign children improve their skills, but they do it “to a lesser extent” than their Spanish classmates.
Onion has explained the details of the study in the I Moroccan Colloquium in Spain, organized on Tuesday in Barcelona by the Association of Friends of the Moroccan people (Itran). Congress has analyzed the situation of the Moroccan community in the country from different points of view: the migratory process, integration, the workplace and also the educational world.
In the Education Board he has intervened, in addition to the CSIC researcher, the political scientist Julián Claramunt, who has warned about the risks of school segregation. Claramunt explained that Spain suffers “a serious problem of school segregation”, since there often there is no balance between the social composition of the classrooms and that of the environment. “If we have classrooms that represent the reality of the streets, it is easier for hate speeches on the one hand, and those of radicalization on the other, they are reduced.”
