TOOn his first day as Head of Cabinet of the Ministry of Education, Alessandro Fusacchia was greeted by a clerk who stood at attention to open the door for him. He, thanking him, replied that he would have done it alone. And the clerk immediately went to complain about demotion. Start with this memory The Naked State – Intimate History of the “Good School” (The third) written by Alessandro Fusacchia, Head of Cabinet at the Ministry of Education from 2014 to 2016, recently a former deputy. An anecdote that makes you think about how difficult it is to change, even if you are in the halls of power: “We must have the humility to understand but also the air of wanting to innovateotherwise you will succumb », says Fusacchia.
The cover of Alessandro Fusacchia’s book on the Good School.
The parable of the Good School, law 107/2015 which should have been the flagship of the Renzi government, is very indicative: “I did not want to investigate that law, divide between good and bad, but accompany the reader to make him understand live – not surprisingly I use the historical present – what happened”, the author tells us. There are many reasons why it didn’t work. We could start from the very hard opposition of teachers: “Despite 140-160 thousand people having joined thanks to the Good School, they organized a strike that had an extraordinary success “.
Against the headmaster-sheriff
«Getting out of the mess of the rankings of teachers is impossible. But we wanted to overturn the basic assumption. And that is: stop asking ourselves, how it had been done up to then, Who has gained the most rights to enter the role?. On the contrary, it would have been more correct to start by asking: Which students do I have to train, with what training objectives and which teachers I need to achieve them? The idea of that season was to focus on competitions to raise the overall level of those who would enter school. But with this mass of precarious workers, not only do the amnesties not work, but neither do the public competitions, which should be rethought in order to be able to take on people capable of dealing with the complexity “. The ambitious attempt failedalso due to the opposition of the unions who wanted to hire other categories of temporary workers.
But there were also other reasons for failure: mobility “historically the Italian school has more chairs available in the north and more teachers in the south”, the strong contestation by the so-called “sheriff-headmaster” “But someone should take responsibility”, the alternation between school and work, immediately halved and renamed by the subsequent Minister of Education Marco Bussetti.
Alessandro Fusacchia, author of The Nude State – Intimate History of the Good School (Laterza).
Alessandro Fusacchia: “The Good School wanted to bring in the merit”
A particularly topical issue is that of merit: “Renzi put 200 million on the plate to reward the merit of the teachers but open up heaven, the principle could not pass and did not pass“. It will be interesting to see what will happen now, that we have the Ministry of Education and Merit: should only students be deserving or should teachers be too? Who will define the merit and how? At the time of the Good School, teachers and high school students massively boycotted the Invalsi trials and families were with them. Nobody wanted to be evaluated. And now?
From this very well argued book, rich in content but easy to read, the difficulty of innovating the Public Administration clearly emerges. Some details are striking, such as the number of teachers who benefit from law 104. In some regions of the South, it reaches 15 percent. Of course, the Good School did not fail for this. Politics also has its faults, as emerges from the book. “I want to make it clear how difficult it is to make decisions,” adds Fusacchia. “Those who decide often do not even have the necessary information, because the data is missing. We have made a lot of mistakes in the mechanics. If you don’t know the car, you risk not being incisive ».
After years of school cuts, there were 3 billion more available, but it was not enough. The Good School failed, we returned exactly to the situation as before. Since then, nothing has changed. Just think of the parable of distance learning: indispensable at the time of Covid, then accused – rightly – of having contributed to increasing inequalities, has been put on the back burner. You have gone back to before: even the interviews with the professors have returned to being in attendance, with hours that are impossible for those who work. The reason? Nobody. If not the will to stand still.
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