Religion loses classroom hours, but PISA scores keep falling

Religion loses hours and PISA keeps falling: the thesis doesn't add up

The blame for poor PISA results lies with Catholic religion. The phrase has been circulating on social media for days, endorsed by a teacher who compares Spain with the top ten countries in the report — all except the United Kingdom, he claims, have no religion in the classroom — and denounces that here two hours a week are lost indoctrinating in a dogma. The diagnosis is catchy and has an arithmetic problem: in the same period in which religion has been losing weight in the school timetable, results have not stopped falling.

From two hours to one: what has peine to religion in the classroom

The legal framework does not support the star figure of the argument. With the LOMLOE, the state minimum for the subject was set at a single weekly hour, which in primary school meant cutting a third of the time it had. Furthermore, the subject no longer counts towards the average grade. Six regions — Galicia, Navarra, Castilla-La Mancha, Canarias, La Rioja and Cantabria — squeezed it even further.

Read coldly, the data would support the opposite thesis: if religion hindered learning, removing hours should have improved performance. It didn't happen. Grades continue downhill and the subject is no longer what it was. The breakdown region by region, with the real teaching time of each, is the material that official numbers do not release all at once.

One hour does not explain nine subjects

The second front is one of scale. Defenders of the diagnosis argue that any minute dedicated to a dogma is a minute stolen from maths or language. Against it weighs the order of magnitude: sixty minutes out of a weekly timetable of twenty-five or thirty is a small margin to sustain a structural fall in results in reading, mathematical and scientific competence.

Some go further and place the true cult elsewhere: not in catechism, but in a certain classroom doctrine disguised as a subject, with its own catechism and its own sarracena. It is an ideological reading, difficult to quantify and easy to ridicule. But it shares with the original thesis the same vice: attributing to a single variable a system that breaks in several places.

The foreign-origin student and the variable nobody isolates

Part of the analysis points to the composition of the student body. It is argued that schools with a high percentage of students of foreign origin, many without sufficient command of the language, perform worse in a test read in Spanish. It is a reasonable hypothesis and notoriously difficult to isolate: talking about linguistic integration is not the same as talking about results, and mixing them serves headlines more than diagnosis.

Others stress the opposite — that public schools without religion perform the same or worse than religious semi-private schools — and point to method, demand and merit as the levers that truly move the needle. It is the least comfortable axis of the debate and, probably, the one that explains the most.

Teachers, positions and the ghost of soft access

In the midst of the noise, an administrative detail emerges that does have numbers. For years there was a system of making temporary teachers permanent that allowed exchanging an opposition exam for the submission of a ten-page report, in a transitional model that spread across several regions. If the debate is about the quality of the system, that is a starting point with paperwork, not a barroom opinion.

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With religion at minimums and results declining, it is foreseeable that the focus will shift to teacher training and classroom composition. If those variables also don't add up, an uncomfortable conclusion will remain: the problem is not an hour of catechism, but an entire system whose foundations are failing.