Changing School Policies in Italy: From Welfare Equity Model to the New Public Management Instrumentations

By drawing on a socio-material perspective, the chapter describes the processes of alignment of school policies in Italy to transnational regimes. It is argued that the key passage in the complex transformation of the Italian system in the latest 20 years is given by the policy of school autonomy implemented at the beginning of the Millennium. School autonomy changed the direction of education policy of this country from the Welfare Equity model to the logic of New Public Management (NPM). Through a detailed historical reconstruction and several empirical findings from a long research program on school governance, the chapter illustrates that this shift develops under the ‘magister of influence’ of OECD and EU and gives rise to a nuanced NPM assemblage where centralism and bureaucracy live with the policy instrumentations of school improvement and effectiveness (large scale assessment surveys) and the digital governance of education. This assemblage shares a neo-liberal orientation, is supported by a wide bipartisan consensus, and marginalizes or tries to subsume pedagogical activism and professional cultures that were fundamental to the affirmation of the Welfare Equity model in the period of national reconstruction after the Post World War II. These dynamics underline how movements between waves of standardization of education involve far from linear changing relationships between state (s), the professions, and the science of education.