Presentation issue 17º

ADIDE-Federation, concerned and attentive to the theoretical and daily course of the educational system, held in the Madrid city of Alcalá de Henares on the last days of October 17, 18 and 19 its XII State Congress of Education Inspectors. The theme around which the meeting revolved was the evaluations as a diagnosis and practice of educational quality. On the relevant issues exposed by the speakers invited to the Congress we configure today this number, and especially its monographic part. Monograph that begins with the work presented by Professor Juan Manuel Escudero and María Ángeles Moreno, professors at the University of Murcia. Its starting point is that the improvement of education, the autonomy of schools and educational inspection are three core elements of school systems. The first, duly understood, connects with the guarantee of the right to education for all people; the second, with a form of government of the centers that makes possible and effective that one; the third belongs properly to a series of aspects related to the role and responsibility of public authorities, both in that legality is fulfilled and in that the structures, relationships and processes within school systems effectively make possible the universal guarantee of the right of everyone to a good education. It is about betting on an inclusive education, for which the school, family and community relations should be rethought, giving due prominence to directors, teachers and students. And in this new framework, which would place the centers and their protagonists in a responsible and constructed autonomy, the Education Inspectorate should play a worthy role, participating in dynamics of improvement. Because, as the authors affirm, the idea of ​​professional learning communities not only concerns the autonomy of the centers, but also challenges others, the inspection in particular, their relations with other professionals, the same administration in its different planes The inspection and the creation of capacities and commitments with the improvement of education. And all this without forgetting that the Education Inspectorate must account for the pulse of the education system, in a co-responsible and efficient manner.

Tomás Secadura Navarro, Inspector with a long career in the Inspection Service of Madrid, who has exposed on different occasions, including in the virtual pages of our magazine, his reflections on a different model of Education Inspection, dive into the relationship between evaluation and the intervention models of the Inspection. The Inspector, he will tell us, what is all a declaration of intentions, is an inspector rather than an evaluator. From this statement forms its proposal: defense of a macro approach to the educational system, and consistent with its model, the inspection will play a collaborative role, especially in the phases of monitoring and verification of the consequences arising from the tests implemented . And the inspection focused on this collaborative role, calls on the Administrations to take advantage of that Force and position of the Inspection Service from a technical watchtower that allows them to look globally at the educational system. In this way, he will tell us, it will contribute to the Inspection Service becoming a modern and modernizing force of the Educational System, since this is its object and mission.

Salvador Pallarés Martínez and Josep Serentill Rubio, Inspectors in the Autonomous Community of Catalonia, address a current issue in their article The preparation and interpretation of center indicators. They propose, as an instrument to improve the results of educational centers, the use of indicators as a technique and orientation to know the situation and make improvement decisions. They understand the evaluation of the center itself as a systematic process aimed at assessing its value in order to improve its educational and educative action. For this, they start from the concept of indicator, understood as an explicit and intelligible statement or criterion that allows measuring the facts and educational processes that occur in the center itself. From here they propose an experimental design organized on the real structure of the centers, including their heterogeneous features. They propose to organize them hierarchically, according to the institutional documents that the center elaborates long, medium and short term, considering that the Educational Project, defining their identity, inspire and guide the indicators. After teaching us how to make indicators that are very close to the reality of the center, and easy to use, we find out how to approach their interpretation in order to help us address and introduce educational strategies for improvement. A good introduction to the evaluation methodology of centers, both for its foundation and for the simplicity of its proposal.

Rogeli Santamaría Luna, Coordinating Inspector in the Directorate of the Territorial Area of ​​Castellón de La Plana focuses his work on a call for us not to remain impassive in front of a type of society and school sidelong glance from the city, the rural school The objective of this text is to review some myths linked to the rural school that may have different readings, even with contributions that contradict the most widespread opinions: poor quality and low performance. The author maintains that the repeated poor quality of the rural school is an easy argument to make, based on the educational ignorance of those who use it with an empirical methodological base of large decontextualized numbers, inadequate to evaluate small samples for which it is required a quantitative-qualitative mixed empirical methodology. From this methodology, almost based on the study of cases, the data will not allow sharp conclusions, which allows it to refute the hypotheses of its devaluation. And with these data, a call for the contribution of the inspectors in their role as guarantors of the educational rights of all, also of those who inhabit the society and rural school.

Finally Salvador Pallarés, Head of Evaluation and Monitoring of the Education Inspection of Catalonia, exposes in this article an approach to the culture of evaluation in Catalonia and its evolution in the last fifteen years in two areas: in the introduction of the evaluation in educational centers and in the intervention model of the Inspection

As a whole, the different articles that make up this monograph try to explain some essential ideas for the good progress of education, and they do it in a simple way, without the pompous jargon of the technique that today drives a good part of the academic works . To all of them, for your illustration and support, we appreciate your collaboration.

The Editorial Board