Discourses of merit. The hot potato of teacher evaluation in Italy

Abstract

Italy is well known for its difficulty in introducing any educational evaluation system. This paper explores the dynamics which occurred in Italy in 2010–2011, within the context of the umpteenth national pilot of school and staff evaluation. Our research object is an unfinished project, observed in its development. We get close to the struggles of policy enactment, capturing the processes of borrowing, bricolage, translation and mediation involved in the vernacularisation of the global accountability trends in a national context. Using governmentality and the repertoire of Callon’s sociology of translation, we deconstruct events and displacements and reshape them in a policy ‘storytelling’. We show a paradoxical story of resistance, where teachers and their unions displayed a strong capacity of effective counter-action, becoming active members of the policy trajectory, but were eventually confronted with displacements which weakened their resistance. Although still open-ended, our story provides evidence of the uncertainty, unpredictability and disputability which characterise policy trajectories. We talk of this process of translation as a still-missed opportunity to develop a situated dialogue about more democratic forms of accountability, where a real account is given of what happens in schools and why, and evaluation is interpreted as a form of contextualised and knowledge-grounded reflection on professional practice.

Keywords:

• schools and teachers evaluation
• sociology of translation
• resistance
• abjection
• Italy

Acknowledgements

We are particularly grateful to Ken Jones and the two anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful comments on the early drafts of this article.

Notes

1. This article is the outcome of the collaboration of the authors. However, in order to ascribe responsibility, we declare that the Introduction and the ‘Concluding remarks’ are co-authored, Giovanna Barzanò wrote the ‘The translation of a pilot policy to evaluate schools and teachers in Italy: a story-telling’, while Emiliano Grimaldi is the author of remaining paragraphs. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the British Educational Research Association Annual Conference, held in London in September 2011. The narrative in this paper reflects the atmosphere of the 2011 summer, when the Berlusconi government was in power and the pilot project described here, with its two actions, was in the middle of its development. Today, the political situation has shifted and a technical government is now in power. The ministry is not headed anymore by a politician with no experience in education (nor in other professional fields), rather an academic is in charge, a distinguished scholar in electronics and former university dean. In line with his very different predecessors in the last decade, he has declared his intention to proceed towards the introduction of system, teacher and headteacher evaluation with new proposals addressing schools. What we describe and discuss here is thus a slice of the ‘present’ which has quickly become history. New kinds of uncertainties are now arising, together with the forecast of new clashes …

2. The interview was published in the popular centre-left weekly magazine L’Espresso in October 2000 under the title: ‘the teachers’ rebellion: farewell to a cruel test’.

3. VSQ is expected to end in 2014.

4. The precariousness of a good number of teaching positions is a characteristic of the Italian education system. Despite the importance of teachers as a working force, several of them have to hold temporary jobs for years before being confirmed. They have, therefore, ‘a tortuous and fragmented career route’ (Jones et al. 2008, 169).

5. Until 1974, teachers were assessed by their headteacher every year and graded on the basis of a four level scale.

6. The battle is still ongoing. VSQ is widely acknowledged as the ‘successful forerunner’ of a new model of school evaluation (VALES) the current technical government wants to launch in 2013. Valorizza, after few months of apparent oblivion, has been only recently revitalised by its promoters, who benefited from the support of OECD-CERI. Overall, a wider consensus has emerged on their discursive underpinnings, thanks to the enacted celebratory framework.