Thirty years of school councils. Parents’ involvement in the control and management of schools supported by public funding in Spain

Resumen

This paper analyzes the parents participation in the control and management of state and government funded schools. The depth of this participation generates a huge controversy in the Spanish society starting few years before the Spanish transition to democracy began. As early as 1970, under Franco’s dictatorship, a new general education law was passed. Progressive groups were in favor of introducing democratic devices in schools, basically a collegiate body made up by
teachers, parents and pupils with capacity to take decisions on the selection of the director of the school, its educational project, its yearly plan, pupils admission, and on. On the contrary, the conservative groups, clearly led by the Catholic Confederation of Parents, considered the main priority for Spanish education to be the right of parents to select the school they want their offspring to enroll in. Debates about article 27 of the Spanish Constitution and the first two laws that develop it (the conservative School Statute and the progressive Right to Education Law) account for the huge disparities around this subject. Finally, the paper tries to explain the
amazing low level of parents participation in the elections for school councils and how they understand their own participation. In order to explain this, documents written by the main parents confederations, parliamentary debates about the Constitution and the two  aforementioned law, and official and research data on participation in school councils has been analyzed.