A Tale of Two School Systems: Funding in the United States and Italy

In December 1993 a law known as Finanziaria 1993 was approved by the Italian legislature. A minor article of this law, article 4, introduced a revolution in the Italian educational system, since it required that each single school should be allowed “financial, organizational and educational autonomy.” Maybe the introduction of such an article in a “financial” law was predicated on economic considerations, such as the presumed economic benefits of reducing the centralized bureaucracy of the Italian school system. Whatever the rationale, the brief statement of article 4 challenged the traditional hierarchical and centralist assumptions of the Italian system in favor of an approach based on local autonomy. It ended the long history of an educational vision inherited from Napoleon and strengthened during the Risorgimento, which ensured the triumph of centralized and statist views. Probably it was not an accident that this law was proposed in 1993 during the heigh...