The first graph shows the comparison between two different yield averages: the evidence relating to the TIMSS tests carried out in the fourth grade in mathematics in 2003 and performed the same four years later, in 2007, in eighth grade. This makes it possible to compare the returns of the same generation of students in two different school contexts, that of the elementary and junior high school. Unlike the result of the comparison made between the results of the eighth grade and the data reported in the second year of high school (data-OECD Pisa 2009) reported that instead of a recovery yield of Italian students. The most critical one is then highlighted by the school, where there was a lowering of the overall performance of students. In the 2011 Report of the Agnelli Foundation School it reads:
The tests conducted in 2003 confirmed the excellent performance of the fourth Italian elementary: although slightly younger at the time of the survey (9.8 years compared to 10.3 of the international standard), the students of our country did record an average score equal to 516 503 in math and science. In both cases it was scored significantly higher than the international average.
Tests in 2007, the same cohort of young Italians, now landed almost all the eighth grade, has received much less satisfactory results: 480 points on math tests (significant difference compared to the international average of 500).
The recent publication of the OECD-PISA 2009 data adds another installment to our story: the revolt, as is known, the olds, the survey allows you to look again at the performance of the generation of 1994, this time on the benches of the school.
With all the precautions necessary when comparing data from different sources, we can say that the view of the continuing decay of learning Italian is not confirmed. Unfortunately, the results of Pisa 2009 will not only bring good news: In Italy there are still, in fact, is staggering disparities between different regions and between the addresses of high school.
Test data Invalsi, reported here, show regional differences in educational level. This is a phenomenon that has a value for every phase of education, from primary to secondary education. On the results, we read:
The gap is visible in Italian from elementary (even under the impact of the use of dialect as a language familiar in some geographical areas), while it is lower in mathematics. In both cases, the delays are getting worse in the sixth grade, while the performance of middle school would think of a recovery during the secondary level. However, as has been widely documented, this result is actually an illusion due to the statistical notorious phenomenon of copying and improper help (cheating) to test various degrees, which is accentuated in eighth grade, where the test is an integral part of the state.
The breakdown of the population of Italian teachers for teaching degrees indicates clearly a demographic and social consolidation: the more schooling to lower birth rates, the changes are reflected in the composition of the teaching organizational Italian. In particular, according to the School Report, the three school levels were analyzed in these terms. Among primary schools, lower secondary and upper secondary education, it is the school that suffered more, in terms of reorganization failure and aging of the teaching staff.
Since the early seventies to the early nineties [elementary schools] have seen down the ratio of pupils
and teachers from 21 to 10 by the combined effect of a reduction of about 40% of the members and a parallel increase of 30% of the teachers. The law 148/1990, which provided for the teacher’s exceeded one and the introduction of the module (three teachers in two classes), and the establishment of the time ‘long’, has thus created afterwards the conditions for organizational learning and more profitable use of teaching staff in the two previous decades had continued to be recruited in total indifference to the changes – substantial and predictable – the demand for primary education.
In high school, however, the effects of population decline have been more than offset by a parallel rise in schooling, however, very late compared to what happened in most developed countries in the seventies and eighties the school population has grown by 75 %, while teachers at different addresses are meanwhile more than doubled. In the next two decades, the school population has remained relatively constant and also that of teachers has stopped growing.
In middle school, nothing has happened like this: have not been taken – as for elementary – school policy measures
and organizational innovations such as to justify, even in retrospect, a more intensive use of staff, since in the second half of the seventies the average school attendance rates had reached and exceeded 100% before repeat a, declining population trends have not found a clearing in the greater school participation, as has happened in high school.
What really matters, however, even for the purposes of our critical reflection on the school, is that a prolonged narrowing of the organic phase – obtained through a recruitment year after year, has replaced only part of the teachers left for retirement or for other reasons – has inevitably affected the turnover of generations and the structure of the teaching population, accelerating the aging process.
The specificity of the Italian faculty are also a record for the ages and especially for the middle school.
They [Italians] teachers much older at the scene of the OECD member countries. In most developed countries the average age of teachers increases with the grade school, so it’s high school teachers who meet the relatively more mature. In Italy, however, the average age is highest in middle school, that from this point of view holds a record: in OECD countries while two-thirds of teachers in secondary schools have fewer than 50 years in Italy two-thirds have more than 50 years.
TREND beyond school and the composition of the teaching staff, in Italy there is a very special case of absence of social mobility from the point of view of education: almost half of the students of high school graduates have parents. Again the process is a critical step in the school. Here the analysis of the school says:
[…] We note a clear segmentation of the socio-cultural secondary school address. In high school sector for 44% of the students come from families with parents, graduates, compared with 25% of the technical institutes and 23% of the professional. Conversely, only 13% of high school she enrolled in a parent with up to the middle school, a percentage that is about three times lower than that found in vocational schools and vocational training courses. The striking imbalance in the presence of certain social strata in different fields of upper secondary school grade is the clearest evidence of the failure of the school only as a guarantor of educational success for all and, therefore, as an engine of social mobility. So much so that in our country’s choices and levels of education are preserved from one generation to another with a degree of permanence and stability that now it is quite unusual in other advanced economies.
(Report on the Texts cited by the school in 2011 in Italy by the Agnelli Foundation, Laterza Editor)
Translation by Google Translate