A-Infos (en) Italy, FAI, Umanita Nova #14-26 - A Reform to be Scrapped. Technical Institutes Under Attack (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

The government's attack on public schools continues. The target, once 
again, is technical institutes, one of the most important segments of 
the entire school system, with the largest number of students and 
workers. They are also a strategic sector for technological training, 
and therefore attractive for career guidance and for interests linked to 
the manufacturing sector. ---- The Reform for Technical Institutes, 
included in Mission 4 of the National Recovery and Resilience Plan 
(NRRP) and approved by the Council of Ministers in 2022, under the 
Draghi government, when Bianchi was Minister of Education, envisages a 
close connection between education and the manufacturing sector. The 
plan was divided into two phases, the first of which was the pilot 
program for the 4+2 curriculum, which we have discussed on Umanità Nova 
on other occasions. This program, as its name suggests, is strictly 
dependent on market and business needs, with a complete cut of one 
school year, a portion of teaching hours given away to companies, and an 
exponential increase in hours of school-work training (formerly 
work-based learning). Two years after the pilot program was launched, 
the program has proven to be a flop: users have shown very little 
acceptance for this model; in the very few institutions that have 
experimented with it, the intensification associated with compressing 
five years into four has only led to a reduction in quality and 
increased selection for students, increased workloads, and a loss of 
staff for teaching and technical staff.

The second phase of the technician reform is now underway, affecting the 
entire sector. The implementing decree was published last March, which, 
as explicitly stated, aims to update curricula based on demand from the 
national production system. This is a veritable deconstruction of 
curricula and timetables, as well as of the subjects studied, which will 
be grouped by subject area.

Within the 11 curricula, there will be a defined area of national 
general education (language, mathematics, history-geography, 
law-economics, physical education, and the ever-present Catholic 
religion) and a defined flexible curricula (subject areas related to 
experimental sciences and subjects characterizing the curricula), 
including a "territorial" area reserved for companies based on 
partnership agreements with local businesses.

A disaster concocted in the dark, which is expected to begin next 
September 1st, with the 2026-27 school year. Until March, no one knew 
the details of the new structure: not even the families of future 
first-year students who enrolled their children in a school with a very 
different structure from the one that will begin in September; Nor are 
teachers, who in some cases are assigned subjects they've never taught, 
often sharing them with "teachers" from the business world, and who in 
all cases suffer significant cuts in teaching hours.

The changes introduced by this second and even more significant tranche 
of the reform are colossal. Until now, technical schools had a single 
two-year program, and the choice of major was made starting in the third 
grade: a minimal guarantee of a homogeneous basic cultural education and 
greater awareness in choosing a career path. Now, the single two-year 
program is no longer in place; the choice is made midway through the 
eighth grade, and career-related training begins immediately. Also 
noteworthy is the move forward in school-to-work training, which begins 
in the second grade instead of the third, with an overall increase in 
teaching hours.

The chaos the reform creates in subjects is devastating. Many subjects 
are losing hours, including Italian, Mathematics, Art in Tourism, 
Geography, and Foreign Languages. In the two-year program for the 
Environmental Technology area, a new subject called "Experimental 
Sciences" will be introduced, combining Chemistry, Physics, and Science, 
with a single teacher. This mix will result in a total loss of 231 hours 
per class over the two-year period, compared to what would have been 
possible if these subjects had remained independent. The Ministry has 
not yet determined who will teach the new subject "Experimental 
Sciences," which includes the other subjects. Some will be asked to 
teach subjects they don't know; atypical competitive classes will be 
created, combining multiple subjects, and school principals will manage 
staffing based on clientelism; there will be a decline in teaching 
quality and job losses, resulting in the insecurity of tenured teachers 
and unemployment for current temporary teachers. On the other hand, 
alongside the compressed subjects whose hours are being cannibalized, 
there is a certain amount of flexibility, an area in which hours can be 
allocated to the "local community," meaning local businesses and 
enterprises, which can conveniently enter the school, not for an 
extracurricular project, but by occupying curricular space. This fact 
prompts further reflection: beyond the completion of the long-underway 
corporatization process, the inclusion of courses linked to the specific 
entrepreneurial characteristics of a given area-given the marked 
differences in production patterns across the country-also represents a 
way of informally implementing, in schools, the differentiated autonomy 
so longed for by various governments and yet never formally achieved.

As if that weren't enough, this unfortunate overall restructuring of 
technical staff has been conducted with bungling and incompetence. There 
is a lack of guidelines, a lack of guidance on how to manage staffing, 
how to handle redundancies, and everything else. These are operations 
that, under normal circumstances, are carried out at this stage, within 
the first week of May, if the school year is to begin. Schools are 
complex machines, of which the ministry and government appear to be 
completely unaware. When asked for technical clarification, the response 
has been completely inconsistent and impossible to implement. Meager, in 
no way decisive, corrections have been announced, which would, however, 
require not only financial resources but also well-defined operational 
steps, of which there appears to be no clue at the ministerial and 
government levels. Obviously, the plan we are interested in is not the 
smooth technical functioning of a reform that should be thrown away, but 
we must nevertheless highlight the crass incompetence accompanying this 
operation to destroy a portion of public schools.

Many teaching staff have expressed opposition to the reform of the 
technicians, documents have been drafted, and union initiatives have 
been undertaken. The concertative unions quickly called off the unrest, 
saying they were reassured by the clumsy, ineffective, and objectively 
unenforceable fixes promised by Valditara. The CGIL, currently seen in a 
laughable "barricade" mode, as always happens when there's no friendly 
government, distanced itself from the others by demanding nothing less 
than a one-year postponement and the opening of a discussion. The 
grassroots unions active in the school sector are demanding the 
abolition of the technicians' reform. Unicobas included this important 
demand among the points of its strike platform on April 20th, organized 
assemblies, and held a sit-in outside the ministry.

It is important that the mobilization on this issue continues to grow 
and become more radical. No trust can be placed in the concertative 
unions, eternally subservient to the demands of employers and 
Confindustria. Nor can we place any trust in the CGIL's pronouncements, 
which announce short-term and unreliable battles, limiting itself to 
proposing a postponement that will prove ineffective. Moreover, the 
education ministers of "friendly" center-left governments have actively 
advanced the processes of corporatization and privatization of schools 
that have developed over time: from Carrozza under the Letta government, 
to Giannini under Renzi, to Fedeli under the Gentiloni government, or 
the aforementioned Bianchi, minister under Draghi. This is only 
referring to the recent period; if we then go back to the early 2000s, 
we recall that Minister Berlinguer already wanted to shorten the high 
school curriculum by a year and introduce a corporate-inspired merit 
assessment. In short, it's important to distinguish between those making 
credible protests and those playing at being the opposition of the 
moment. We must not forget, among other things, the interests that the 
CGIL also has in the management of the technical and vocational training 
programs activated by the Regions, in which the space reserved for 
businesses is extremely significant and which have long constituted an 
alternative to purely job-based training, competing with the technical 
and vocational education offered by public schools.

Against the reform of technicians, we need clear, timely, and radical 
opposition. It must be rejected, not postponed and refined. We support 
the mobilizations of grassroots unions, workers, teachers' associations, 
and students who are truly fighting against a process that will lead, in 
addition to all the disasters highlighted above for the sector, to an 
increase in the power of the employers, to increased exploitation, and 
to making the younger generations slaves of labor.

We forcefully oppose all this.

Patrizia Nesti

https://umanitanova.org/una-riforma-da-buttare-istituti-tecnici-sotto-attacco/
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