Mounk and the common school: integration without uniformity in Spain's classrooms

When we explained Yascha Mounk's The Great Experiment on day 23, we promised to come back at the end of the week and work out what a common school without uniformity would ask of Spain. This is that piece.

Mounk's starting claim, in his publisher's words, is that no democracy has yet managed to be both diverse and fair to all its ethnic and religious groups, and that whether people see one another as strangers or compatriots depends on the institutions we build. He rejects two familiar models. The melting pot, as the New Rambler Review summarises him, fails to respect citizens' cultural traditions and pushes newcomers to hide where they come from. The salad bowl, where groups live side by side, tends to fragment. His alternative is a public park: people can gather with those like them or join activities with complete strangers, and nobody suffers pervasive discrimination.

A park is something you design. You decide where the paths go, which benches face each other, what the rules are. In a country, the most important park is the school, because it is the one place where nearly every child spends years under the same rules as children from other families.

Spain's park is already full

According to Ministry of Education data reported by The Objective in July 2025, foreign nationals made up 12.9% of pupils in non-university education in 2024-25, more than a million, after a decade of uninterrupted growth. The largest groups were Moroccan, Colombian and Romanian. The share reached 19% in the Balearic Islands, 18.5% in the Valencian Community and 16.5% in Catalonia, and it was 14.2% in public schools against 10.2% in private ones.

Results show where the park is working badly. In Catalonia, which has one of the highest shares of pupils of migrant origin, PISA 2022 found a gap of 43 points in maths and reading between native pupils and those of migrant origin, and 46 in science, more than two school years, as Ara reported in December 2023. The Catalan education department first suggested immigrant pupils had been over-represented in the sample, then withdrew the claim after consulting the report's authors. The gap is real.

What Spanish law already says

The good news for anyone who likes Mounk's model is that Spain's education law, the LOE as amended by the LOMLOE, already sketches the park. Article 78 tells administrations to place pupils who join the system late according to their circumstances, knowledge, age and record, in the most suitable year, with support. Article 79 asks for specific programmes for pupils with serious language gaps, and says they must run at the same time as schooling in ordinary groups. Article 87 asks administrations to set a balanced share of pupils with specific support needs for every public and state-funded private school, to reserve places for them until the end of enrolment, to allow up to 10% more pupils per class for late arrivals, and to take measures when a school ends up with a high concentration.

That is very close to Mounk's design: newcomers in the ordinary class, extra help on the side, and every publicly funded school taking its share. Practice lags the text. Admissions by address and by school reputation keep sorting children, as we showed in our piece on segregation in Madrid and Catalonia.

A common school without uniformity

Here is what we would ask of Spain's schools.

From the left, the fair share. Every school paid for with public money, public or concertada, takes its proportion of newcomers and pupils with extra needs, as article 87 already says, and gets the staff and money to support them. The proportion is published every year for every town, so that families and inspectors can see who is meeting it.

From the right and the liberal tradition, one standard and real freedom. Every child is held to the same high expectations and the same assessments, with no lowered bar for anyone because of where their parents were born. Every child leaves school fluent in Spanish and, where it applies, the co-official language, because a shared language is the ground the park stands on. And families keep their choice among a plural set of schools, and their culture, language and faith at home and in their community, which is the freedom Mounk's park protects.

What fits neither camp is the design detail that makes the park work. Language support happens inside the school day and alongside the ordinary class, in intensive blocks with a clear exit test, so that a ten-year-old from Bogotá or Casablanca spends most of the day with classmates from day one. Reserved places are allocated before the ordinary admission round, so that mixing is the default from the start. And integration gets a measure: the gap in results, repetition and early leaving between children of immigrants and their classmates, published by region and school, with the same census assessments we argued for on day 23. Mounk's test is whether people see each other as compatriots. The school's version of that test is whether, by 16, you can no longer predict a child's results from their parents' passport.

This is also where this week's question about mobility meets the programme's later week on migration. A child who arrives at nine and leaves school at 18 with the same chances as the girl next to her has climbed the mobility ladder and become a compatriot in the same move. Spain's law already describes that school. The job now is to run it, measure it and publish the results.