Italian parliament approves school system reform

The Italian Lower House definitively approved a school system reform on Thursday, after nine months of tense debate among political forces and throughout the country.

Lawmakers gave the final green light to the bill with 277 votes in favor and 173 votes against.

Italy's Senate had already passed the draft law on June 25, after Prime Minister Matteo Renzi's cabinet had called a confidence vote to push through the controversial reform.

The "Good School", as the government dubbed the package, includes measures such as hiring some 100,000 temporary teachers on a permanent basis, and increasing the headmasters' power to select and promote teachers, and to manage their school.

The reform increases the autonomy of the single schools, and strengthens the teaching of English language, music, and physical education from primary schools, environmental education from lower secondary schools, and logic and maths from upper secondary schools. The teaching of academic subjects in a foreign language will also become compulsory in upper secondary schools.

Professional training will be stepped up, with traineeships in firms becoming compulsory up to 400 hours in the last three years of vocational and technical schools, and up to 200 hours in all other types of high schools.

The reform offers tax breaks to the families who enrol their children to private schools, and to those who contribute private funds to public schools.

Every three years, an outside panel of auditors will evaluate school managers on the quality of the school teaching and their management skills. Schools will be required to publish their balance sheets and teachers' curriculums online.

The measures will come into force starting from the new school year in September.

Investments worth 1 billion euros (1.10 billion U.S. dollars) in 2015, and 3 billion euros per year from 2016 on, will be allocated to implement the reform, according to the government.

The Good School blueprint was unveiled in September 2014, and presented to the Lower House on March 12.

It met with a strong opposition from a large section of teachers, unions, and students. Angry protests took place across the country until the very last days, with hundreds of people gathering before the Lower House as lawmakers were engaged in the final reading.

It was also contested by opposition forces and by a minority of lawmakers within the Renzi's Democratic Party, which presented thousands of amendments in parliament.

Opponents of the reform feared the plan would overall weaken Italy's public schools, despite the new hirings and the allocation of financial resources. A main worry for them was the new powers given to schoolmasters, added to the increased autonomy of each school, might lead to abuses and clientelism, and make the public school system unfair.

The cabinet allowed minor changes to the draft law, but insisted the reform would enhance the quality of the public school teaching, providing resources to improve education and reducing insecurity among teachers.

Both domestic and international analyses partially blamed the school system for Italy's lack of growth in the last decade and for its current record-high youth unemployment rate.

According to a 2013 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) report, Italy spent 3.2 percent of its gross domestic product on its public educational system in 2010, less that all the other eurozone countries.

Italian high school students performed below average in maths, reading, and science in the most recent OECD PISA assessment 2012, which evaluates education systems in 65 countries around the world. Endit