The “Guidelines” for the resumption of school in September, just published by the Ministry of Education, leave three basic questions unanswered. First: we do not know with which staff the schools will have to organize their teaching and administrative activities, given that at the moment teachers and ATA staff have been assigned according to the usual parameters.
Second: it is not clear whether it will be compulsory to guarantee the entire amount of hours per year to the students or whether, as in the school year just ended, there may be reductions as a result of the need to organize shifts or provide lesson hours of less than 60 minutes.
Third: the issue of effective powers conferred on school managers to take the organizational decisions necessary to guarantee the performance of teaching activities in presence and in safety is not addressed.
Until these issues are addressed, the ministerial lines are likely to remain a manual of beautiful intentions, which in fact discharge charges and responsibilities on managers without however providing a certain regulatory framework or powers commensurate with the task.
In all this, the time factor does not seem to be taken into account. The ministerial guidelines refer largely to what was already contained in the previous document of the technical scientific committee of the Civil Protection, published at the end of May: was it really necessary to wait a month to make those indications your own, making the schools waste more precious time? Rather than indulge in such a delay, an ecology of communication would have been appropriate instead of the current manager of Viale Trastevere too often: the almost daily and often contradictory statements, the bad habit of presenting the press and social networks measures before these materialize in official documents, end up conveying the impression of a confusion of the political direction and multiplying the uncertainties of the picture, complicating the work of those who are called to face the complex issue of returning to school on the field.
That there is little awareness proves once again the multiplication of the tables and places of discussion, which are, moreover, of doubtful utility: in the ministerial guidelines a Covid-19 control booth is foreseen at the ministry, a national table with unions and civil protection for the drafting of a protocol on safety at school, regional tables operating at the regional school offices (which should involve three regional councilors – education, transport and health – and various other figures, but significantly no school manager), service conferences at provincial or municipal level, but which may also be organized with further sub-articulations.
This multiplication of the places of discussion lengthens – once again – the times and above all represents a tic in perfect contradiction with the declared intention to enhance the autonomy of educational institutions: this does not need national, regional, provincial or municipal tables (the usual pyramid that extends from the center to the periphery), but with a certain regulatory framework and adequate tools to achieve the specific training offer (which is made up of territorial specificities, but also of educational choices and pedagogical options), applying the general rule to concrete reality.
Autonomy and subsidiarity are exercised within a clear general regulatory framework. The continuous reference to these two expressions is serious, and they also occur several times in the guidelines, without however taking care to create the conditions so that they can become ordering principles of the system. In particular, it makes no sense to evoke the autonomy of schools without reckoning with the many constraints that limit their exercise.
If we really want autonomous schools in a subsidiary framework, a profound revision of the governance of schools is needed (the reference standards for collegial bodies are still the delegated decrees of 1974); the assignment to managers of clear work organization and personnel identification powers; a contract renewal that provides teachers with greater salary resources but above all possible career developments, leaving behind the hypocrisy that teachers would all be equal and their remuneration must grow exclusively by seniority; the resumption and consolidation of the evaluation processes of schools and school managers, an essential tool to support the continuous improvement of the national education system; the definition of an essential regulatory framework through a prudent use of the single text instrument. If you do not get to work promptly and for concrete actions on these key issues, appeal to the autonomy of schools is hypocrisy and blame.
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