Italian New Public Management and Distracting Education From Equity and Poverty

This paper explores the controversial embedding of New Public Management in the Italian education system after the school autonomy reform (1997), witnessing a process of restructuring and reculturing. Such a process has been the outcome of the interplay between different factors: the borrowing of education policies and recipes from the global discourse on education, the mediation of those policies by cultural and structural path dependencies, the struggles developing around and between the arenas of politics and of policy production and policy enactment. We show how the Italian NPM has implied: • the entering of new issues in the education debate, • the formation of new subjectivities, especially “new” heads, • the entering of non-educational actors, • the establishment of a new moral environment. We demonstrate how these changes have been accompanied by a shift from a focus on social equity (e.g., reducing dropping out, contrasting material and intellectual “new” and old poverties) towards economic requirements linked to competion and meritocratic values. Analysing the interplay between politics, policy and culture, we draw on Newman’s analytical model (2001) to map the tensions between centralisation/decentralisation and internal/external change. Moreover, we enrich this framework using discourse as a heuristic tool to explore how knowledge and identities are intertwined with practices and relations of power. This framework seeks to highlight the conflicting and overlapping policy tensions and developments of NPM entering the educational scene. The research draws on policy texts analysis and in-depth interviews. Data will be analyzed through an interpretative process of merging Critical Discourse Analysis with Grounded Theory process of coding and subcoding. Interviews with key actors (policy-makers, school inspectors, union representatives, head teachers, experts) have been collected as well as policy texts and documents through a ‘cascade’ sample of institutional web-sites. Looking at the intertwining between the formation of new head teachers and the shifts towards new accountabilities (Barzanò, 2011), the paper shows how school heads and their unions resist the repeated trials of governments to introduce managerialist mechanisms of headship evaluation. It also shows how such resistance, inspired by the welfarist discourse, also implies strong attachments to the aims of social equity. The paper ends with a critical appraisal of the recent efforts made by the Italian government to introduce an overall framework of system, schools and teachers’ evaluation where the heads are not ‘subjectified’ as objects of evaluation but they are requested to enact meritocratic policies. In doing so, we try to investigate how such NPM “educational policies and practices more often fail to address poverty” (AERA call 2013) as a main objecitve in addressing education towards social equity issues.