Discourses of merit. The hot potato of teachers’ evaluation in Italy

Everywhere it is now difficult to think of what our educational actuality is without confronting "accountability". This fashionable, multilayered term is today a "planetspeak" (Novoa, 2002). In the anglophon arena accountability policies are central to educational systems, meanwhile other countries are swinging from policy makers' eagerness to borrow accountability strategies from abroad to educators’ resistance to accept initiatives which they think threatening their professional values. In Italy, in the last decades several attempts to create evaluation systems were unsuccessfully implemented. This paper draws on the dynamics that emerged in a recent initiative launched by the ministry, aimed at piloting a voluntary teacher reward scheme. The "best" teachers of selected schools would have been awarded “financial prizes” after assessment of their performances and professional reputation. What the government expected to be a proud celebration of a new meritocratic turn, after ages of “bureaucratic egalitarianism”, resulted in rejection and complaint. A documentary analysis has been undertaken of ministerial official documents and presentations and of documents, contributions, comments published by national press and professional websites. First, the paper describes the inner logic of the new accountability policy framing the pilot within the context of a wider project to establish a new form of governmentality based on ‘performativity’ and reputation. Second, the ‘discourses’ developed around the pilot are analysed, looking at both the Ministry’s attempts and the unions’, teachers’ and public opinion’s reactions. The paper shows the slippery implications of the “merit logic” and how, in the messy Italian political scenario, it left both sides to handle a hot potato. The ministry’s proposal makes even sharper the contradictions of its policy and cuts. Meanwhile unions and associations locked themselves up in corporatist positions leading teachers towards a possible trap: their complaint is interpreted as the “guilty” rejection of a professional category which refuses evaluation, enhancing their “bad reputation”. We argue that the ritualistic enactment of the pilot policy resulting from these struggles is a missed opportunity to develop more democratic forms of evaluation, where a real account is given of what happens in schools and why (Ranson, 2003) and evaluation is interpreted as a form of contextualized and knowledge-grounded reflection (Goodson, 2003) on professional practice. However the debate is paramount and well documented, its analysis provides a meaningful inventory of how resistance and its dynamics occur in the field, teachers’ angry and passionate voices shed light on a range of counter-elaborations and possible perspectives.