Historically the evidence from international surveys shows that Spanish students have levels of performance below the OECD average, particularly in maths, which have followed a flat line for over a decade (from 2000 onwards) showing a complete lack of progress until some improvements took place around 2015. When compared to other countries, Spain has very few excellent students. This flatness has been wrongly interpreted as a signal that the Spanish education system has sacrificed quality for the sake of equity. Nothing could be further from the truth. The most distinctive feature is the high rate of early school leaving, which represents the worst kind of inequity. During and after Covid-19 student performance declined despite short school closures. The policy response to the pandemic was to lower standards, leading to negative consequences. During the state of alarm, central government decreed that grade repetition was forbidden, all students should promote to the next grade and teachers should give their students higher grades. These apparently temporary measures became the new normal after the latest reform was approved. The result was grade inflation on a major scale. Thus, over the last years teachers’ grades have become higher, while international surveys clearly show declines in levels of performance. Such complacency at the national level will prevent any improvements. These changes have had a greater impact among secondary students since it is at this stage that grade repetition used to be most common and students who failed several subjects could not promote or obtain degrees. The new model has created a mirage in which teachers’ grades have become disentangled from true levels of performance. The idea that this would help students who suffered the greatest learning losses is just plain wrong, since those students will not be correctly identified and will not receive the support they need. In addition, the illusion created by the levels of grade inflation achieved, generate the false impression that levels of performance are improving, and therefore policies are having a positive impact, when ILSAs tell us the opposite.Finally, there are two rich regions which in the last cycles have experienced the steepest declines. Catalonia and the Basque Country have strong pro-independence movements which have identified education as a great lever to strengthen national identities. As part of these nationalistic politics, schools teach in the co-official languages exclusively, treating Spanish as a foreign language. In such cases the proportion of students who take the test (PISA, PIRLS and TIMSS) in a language different from that spoken at home is over half of the student population, most of them Spanish students who speak Spanish at home. Clearly such policies harm the ability of students to learn.