«The recent sentence canceling the failure of a student with specific learning disabilities (DSA) registered at our high school issued by the TAR of Valle d’Aosta, which is added to numerous other similar provisions issued both at a local and national level, leaves us dismayed. Not wanting to go into the details of the case here, we are sincerely concerned about the educational repercussions that it may have on students and the school system in general.”
Over 50 teachers from the Regina Maria Adelaide high school of human sciences and science in Aosta wrote this in a letter. «Unfortunately, it happens more and more often that – say the teachers – families and students, sometimes supported by the intervention of self-styled experts, understand how their children’s right to study must translate into the duty of teachers to guarantee, at all costs, their educational success, a fact that is in itself unachievable: it is as if a doctor were expected, interfering among other things arbitrarily in his work, that the care he provides necessarily leads to recovery”.
According to the teachers «the compensatory tools and dispensatory measures recognized and granted by the class councils for students with DSA, do not exempt students and families from committing themselves fully and taking on their share of co-responsibility in the educational process, starting from the choice of the path of higher education, which, in the event of failure, in most cases it differs from the indications provided in the previous school level”.
In the ruling last February on the case of the girl with DSA who had not been admitted to the next class a year ago, the administrative judges had highlighted “a substantial deficiency and/or insufficiency of the personalized teaching plan (Pdp) and its implementation”. The teachers write that “for some time we have been witnessing what we believe is a progressive questioning of the founding principles of the teaching profession, whose assumptions we do not share and whose consequences we fear”. The professional from the local health authority who diagnosed the disorder in October 2022 wrote on 13 August 2023 that, as stated in the TAR ruling, “in the PDP prepared by the school, the expected indications were not always respected”.
According to the teachers, “during the year, contemptuous judgments, undue interference, arbitrary evaluations of the work of the school and the teachers multiply, which do not help students to grow, and which arise in a society that it is not educating children to face the possible frustration of expectations and to manage possible failure, but which leads us to look for easy shortcuts to achieve sufficiency at any cost, regardless of whether this corresponds to real learning or not. The attitude to appeal to the TAR, which in formulating its assessments will hardly delve into the merits of the issues, represents the last frontier of an increasingly speciously threatening attitude, which is exhausting and demotivating for teachers, as well as damaging to their autonomy in the didactic-pedagogical activity sanctioned by article 33 of the Constitution”.
