A professor of a high school Chioggia, in the province of Venice, was dismissed from his assignment: on 24 years of overall service, she hadn’t been to work for as long 20 years. This is because in the first 10 of his career he was totally absent and for the following 14 he was largely on sick leave. In total, he spent only four years in the professorship. The removal from office, decided by Miur, was confirmed by the Court of Cassation. The ministry had proposed to suspend the teacher following an inspection carried out in 2015 and 2016 in the school where she worked, for “absolute and permanent ineptitude to teaching”. The teacher had protested against the decision of the Miur invoking the freedom of teaching. The Court of Cassation rejected her with the verdict 17897 of the Labor Section, arguing that «didactic freedom includes an autonomy in the choice of methods of teaching, but this does not mean that the teacher cannot implement any method or that he cannot organize and structure the lessons».
The defaults
According to the inspection conducted by the Ministry of Education, the teacher he wasn’t paying attention to her own students while questioning them, or because she was constantly sending messages with their cell phone or because they put a talk to other students not questioned. The inspection had also found among the defaults the “absence of criteria sustainable in attributing votesthe lack of clarity and confusion in the explanations, the improvisation, the reading copy of the textbook borrowed from the student (he would never have brought one with him, ed), the absence of logical thread in the sequence of the lessons, the attribution of grades in an extemporaneous and humoral way, the bad way of organizing and preparing the tests». Even i programs finals of his classes were inaccurate: reported a fictitious number of hours dedicated to the explanation of the various topics or he inserted in the list of topics topics never covered in class.
The judicial case
In the light of the numerous non-compliances detected, the Miur had therefore started the dismissal of the teacher in 2017. The woman had then presented appeal. In the 2018 The judge of the Work of the Court of Venice had said he was against the Miur’s decision, as he believed that the inspection had lasted too little to evaluate the teacher’s dismissal, despite admitting the «disorganization and carelessness of the teacher”. The ministry then turned to the Venice Court of Appeal which rejected the worker’s application. In that context, the MIUR had underlined that it was impossible to evaluate the professor for a longer period. «In the registers reported in the minutes – reads the verdict 17899 -, the fact was documented that the teacher, out of 24 years of teaching, appeared to have been absent for a total of 20 years (the first 10 totally absent and for the remaining 14 she was largely part in sickness, from 40 to 180 days per year), ultimately totaling a cumulative total of 4 years of teaching which made it impossible to examine periods longer than those subject to inspection (5 months in 2015, the only ones worked, idem February 2016)”.
