Cherry on cake of government’s miserable ‘first 30 days’
It is already accepted that Portugal’s AD government has had the worst ‘first 30 days’ of any national constitutional government before it. Today, the ‘cherry-on-the-cake’ came with the announcement that renegade education syndicate S.T.O.P is calling a national strike to affect pupils’ summer assessment tests, which start tomorrow.
Coordinator André Pestana, habitually photographed fist-pumping the air, has justified the action (this far unsupported by any other teachers’ union) with a garbled sentence that makes little grammatical sense: “education professionals continue without a fair and transparent assessment, which maintains the quotas, and the many lessons that students missed last year to take the assessment tests, which put a heavy burden on education professionals”.
Reading between the lines, Pestana is complaining that teachers have had too much work to do to prepare their pupils for these assessments. Indeed, his inference is that pupils are not prepared – thus, the tests are a waste of time.
According to Diário de Notícias/ Lusa, he told a press conference convened in Coimbra that the strike “is a way of putting pressure on the government to pay attention to what is happening in public schools”, and that there should be a discussion with teachers to see if these tests “make sense”.
“Parents and grandparents realise that assessment tests, particularly in digital format, have created a lot of anxiety and a lot of unnecessary stress, because we’re talking about children in the second year, aged 7”, he went on.
To be fair, assessment tests continue well into older age groups, and are planned through the month of May.
In Pestana’s mindset: “Pupils are losing a lot of classes because assessment tests imply the loss of many regular classes and overload teaching professionals who are already overloaded, and for this reason, it is bad management of human resources”.
This is ‘breaking news’ of the afternoon. Other teaching syndicates have not yet had a chance to comment so it is difficult to forecast how potentially disruptive this ‘strike’ will be.
