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

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.