With the fateful date of November 15, the online consultation and in the territories on the "Good school", the large and full-bodied document in which a new structure of the school is outlined - "neither referendum nor survey", according to the minister of Education Stefania Giannini, in Matera for the last stage of the presentation tour of the proposal, "but large recording tape", has ended. More than 1 million accesses to the site, over 170 online participants and 100 questionnaires, about 1.650 debates organized throughout the country with a record in Emilia Romagna, about 3.500 public proposals, 16.000 comments and over 90.000 votes in the rooms of the " Let's build the Good School together”, these are the data released by the minister who expressed some caution on the dissemination of the results.
The forecasts of the Minister of Reforms, Maria Elena Boschi, are perhaps overly optimistic, who a few hours later, from Catanzaro, indicated the beginning of next week for the presentation of the results of the consultation, sparking controversy over the inconsistency of the times necessary for the elaboration of a such a vast amount of surveys, but a lot of discontent is perceptible, especially among teachers, for some particularly hot topic.
In fact, the specter that continues to haunt the Italian school is merit. A little less than twenty years ago, Luigi Berlinguer fell in the noble attempt to introduce teacher evaluation mechanisms. He had been the best of the ministers of public education and the Italian school lost, together with the evaluation of the teachers, a very precious opportunity to grow. His successors on Viale Trastevere, on the right and on the left, took good care not to evoke that dangerous ghost and Maria Stella Gelmini, who had also played the bass drum of merit at the beginning of her mandate, immediately hurried to stifle it every echo.
Since last September, with the "Good school", Matteo Renzi has rekindled the fire by introducing, among the key mechanisms of the document, the economic rewards based on the evaluation of the teachers and this issue holds sway in all the demonstrations and debates of recent days. Actually, Renzi's plan revolves around three key elements, the hiring of one hundred and fifty thousand substitute teachers, the evaluation of teachers with the consequent valorisation of merit, drastically increasing the alternation between school and work.
After years of the various provisions and the reorganization of Berlinguer's cycles, this is the first systemic plan that invests the school in its complexity and acts on strategic pivots which are the three mechanisms that will be able to change, unfortunately not immediately but at least in perspective, the school Italian. But this under certain conditions. Provided that the recruitment of one hundred and fifty thousand substitutes leads to the elimination of precariousness and to the full application of the constitutional provision according to which teaching can be accessed only by competition.
This is the first requirement for an affirmation of merit that the evaluation of the teacher's work should sanction with mechanisms to be entrusted to third parties, on the basis of the English model. The expansion of school-work alternation is then fundamental for renewal if it calls into question teaching by skills, especially those key to life and their evaluation in terms of certifications that can be used on the labor market.
But the discontent and protest that are enlivening the audience of school operators and students does not bode well. Faced with the need to innovate the school to face the challenges of complexity, the FLC-CGIL knows only how to evoke the conservation of the existing and flaunts in its "School yard", the usual hackneyed proposals and the stubborn defense of the economic advancement of the teachers by seniority, declaring that it is not necessary to "introduce, even indirectly, elements of hierarchy, competition, individualism or competition between teachers".
In short, speaking of merit is equivalent to an evocation of Satan. The workhorse of the union thus becomes a popular initiative law of 2006, re-presented with great clamor as a bill last July, containing the most generic and conservative lines of principle, practically a photocopy of the existing one.
In this storm, the results of the consultation on the "Good school" are awaited and if the innovative impulses contained in the plan manage to overcome the various conservative resistances, we can perhaps wait for the start of a modernization process.
