Jigsawing education evaluation: pieces from the Italian New Public Management puzzle

The paper deals with the ‘troubled history’ of head teachers’ evaluation in Italy, as a specific strand of the controversial and fuzzy embedding of New Public Management discourse in the Italian education system. Since the 1990s NPM has played a significant role in the process of restructuring and reculturing of the Italian system. New managerialist issues have entered the education debate and have started to shape both policy agendas and professionals’ subjectivities. New alliances between educational and non-educational actors started to populate educational arenas, supporting the NPM turn. Our work analyses a specific strand of this policy trajectory, drawing on policy texts analysis and in-depth interviews with key policy actors and professionals in the national scenario. The work develops in three steps. We outline our sensitizing framework and research methodology, locating our work within the tradition of the studies in governmentality. Then, we draw on Janet Newman’s analysis of governance modernising, using her analytical matrix as heuristic device to map the conflicting and overlapping policy tensions and developments in the Italian education system. A composite picture of the Italian system emerges where NPM recipes clash and confront with welfarist path dependencies. Finally, the paper focuses on the discursive problematizations underpinning the repeated attempts to evaluate heads and their ‘leadership as a lever for improvement’, the networks through which those problematizations developed and their implications in terms of processes of subjectivation. The article offers both a descriptive mapping of the entering of NPM in the Italian education system and the analysis of some ironies of the Italian NPM turn, addressing the paradoxical performative powers of the NPM strategies for the transformation of expertise and the regulation of the activities of professionals.