Efficiency and equity in Learning Communities and Schools

Nowadays education goes in a wrong way. Researches like OECD studies, shows that Spanish education does not run on. The graduation rate for secondary students in 2006 was only a 72% compared to 86% of the E.U.

Sweden is one of the best countries that has a good efficient and equitiative education because of its educational policy. There are a lot of differences between Sweden and Catalonia; not only educational differences, moreover better things like services, sanity, conciliation between family and work (...)

Investing adequatly in education must be the key to change our society and have a good strudens, a good citizens.

Moreover, a good educational policies have to make our schools more equitable and efficient to equiparate the differences between poor and rich families.

Amartya Sen was on of the fisrt economicist that introduced the "affirmative action" to reduce inequalities for ethnic minorities and the gap between whites and blacks.

However, education alone is not enough. Martin Carnoy talked about the social capital of the State, that's the social capital given by the State or institutions. Authors like Bourdieu or Coleman included cultural capital and social capital; two types of capital to consider in a hole education.

"Charter Schools" were known by Martin Carnoy. This type of schools recieve a public money to make their own educational project. This kind of schools suffers a big dropout, absenteeism and a big part of the community are composed by socially disadvantatged groups, with an insignificant social background. Charter Schools are an alternative to public schools, that provides a curriculum that specializes in certain field (maths, science, art ...) to reduce the differences between students from other public schools. One example is "Harlem Children's Zone". Learning comunities schools offers a different way of learning with the involvment of the educational agents of all the comunity (teachers, parents, neigborhood) to help children to grew up in all dimensions. To make this real we have to consider two issues:

• Family training: Must have good relationships between parents and teachers
• Comunity agents: To transformate the school

Levin, in 1997 talked about " X-Efficiency" schools and how has influenced in the schools comunities and students. To have a good efficiency schools must engaged with five characteristics:

1. A clear objective: A dream dreamed by all the members of the schools comunity.
2. Incentives linked to succed: When things go right, people are motived to continuing working to achive the main aim.
3. Decision making: Succed would be faster if all the educative agents are involved to the school.
4. Adaptability to changes: School committees establish the priorities; the main problems can be changed by other ones whatever and whenever they decide.
5. An efficient pedagogy: Heterogenis groups, learning throught the constructivism and using the advanced technology to create a meaningful learning enviroment.

To conclude, "Antonio Machado" public school is one of the great examples about learning comunities schools.

It school had a transformation in 2006. Until 2006 the students of its school (Antonio Machado) were immigrants, Roma or low income students. Moreover they had high levels of absenteeism and poor academic outcomes. So in 2006 started a new project with the collaboration of all the neighborhood's educational agents.

The fisrt two changes were:

• The selection of an experiencial teachers
• The schedules and school organization

These changes helped to transform the school's damaged image, the student's behavior and a great improvment of the level of the students.