NPM and the paradoxical face of standards in education. Tales from Italy

The paper offers a contribution to the unravelling of the complex issue of standardisation in the field of education. Its main argument concerns the paradoxical face of standards, which can act both as technologies of control and normalisation and/or pushes towards critical thinking and professional reflexivity depending on the conditions of their enactment. The analysis of our tales of normalisation and resistance allows us to outline some specific traits of the standardisation as performed by the discourses and technologies inspired by NPM and school effectiveness as discourses of modernisation: a) a specific trait of the new standards in education concerns their establishment as neutral technologies and the hiding of their political assumptions; b) the enactment of NPM and school effectiveness standards, within a framework of competitive comparison and benchmarking, is likely to produce some costs to professionals agency (intensification, loss of autonomy, monitoring and appraisal, lack of decision-making and lack of personal development) which are often unrecognized and hinder processes of empowerment and creativity; c) these standards seem to act more as technologies of control and homogenisation rather than as empowering technologies, pushing professional communities towards processes of fabrication of their performance in order to show their ‘successful’ normalisation; d) a careful analysis of the practices of resistance enacted at the school level is a crucial focus of research in so far as it discloses the existence of ‘practiced’ spaces of alternative thinking where standards can act as impulse to reflexivity.