Class
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Italy’s Parliament is in these days wrestling with the budget bill. This is a lot of annual fun everywhere in parliamentary democracies, but it is particularly entertaining here and now because the process has had the effect of placing the back of the new Center-Left government directly against the wall.
It is not so much that campaign promises will be broken – the Center-Left swore in blood that it would not raise taxes, but will now do so – but rather that a “touch me, feel me” government cannot visibly cut costs without dramatically betraying its electoral constituency. This is all especially delicate because the unsteady coalition lives with a razor-thin margin in Parliament and cannot afford the defection of even single members.
The upshot is that everything must be done with smoke and mirrors. Today’s brief note is about a particularly elegant example.
Page 352 of the truly massive draft budget bill declares that one of the many objectives of this “socially aware” legislation is to enact “appropriate initiatives to contrast scholastic insuccess” by taking into account “different forms of intelligence and different styles of learning.”
It’s hard to argue with actions that make schooling more effective, but that is not what this is about. The proposal actually calls for a mandated reduction of the school failure rate. Keeping flunked students around to make up the classes where they did not get a passing grade is too expensive, so teachers will be instructed to pass more of them.
The bill goes into this in some detail: “A reduction of ten percent of those repeating classes in the first two years of secondary schooling,” would, according to the drafters of the legislation, translate into “savings of 56 million euro annually from 2008” and would begin generating a cost reduction of 18.6 million euro within the year 2007.
So far at least, the teachers unions – very definitely part of the constituency of the new government – appear to have nothing to say about this. The number of children actually in school here has been dropping for years as the Italian birth rate falls off and classes, especially in elementary schools, may now have as many as three instructors each to take into account the “different learning styles” we mentioned above. It might eventually become necessary to hire even more teachers to make sure no child is, ahm, left behind.
But that would be later. In the meantime there is a budget bill to be got out, and the projected savings will help make that happen, whether they are hypothetical or not. Further on, it may turn out that students who do not actually have to learn anything to get passing grades might be found to be poorly educated. That would be a shame. Maybe something will have to be done about that too – later.