Foreign Pupils, Bad Citizens - Global Rome: Changing Faces of the Eternal City - page 83

i personally think that what should arouse our concern at pisacane school is
not the presence of foreign children: that is absolutely predictable, they live
round here, all of them are our neighbors so naturally they come to this school.
what should arouse our concern, but does not . . . , is the fact that the italian
families have gone away; indeed the italians are saying, send our children to
that school? we'd rather take them to another school by car in the morning.1
The reasons for the lack of italian pupils are complex: some may be linked to
italy's legal system, others derive more from the local context. before we set the
pisacane story in the social context of the district, let us take a brief look at the
legal framework for teaching the second generation of immigrants.
immigrant pupils in europe have an overall lower school performance than
do native pupils. immigrant pupils drop out or have to repeat a year more fre-
quently and, in secondary school, are concentrated in lower-level institutions
(Ricucci 2008). This distance between newcomers and natives lessens in the sec-
ond generation—pupils born of foreign parents who received their entire “sec-
ondary socialization” (primary school attendance and formation of a group of
peers) in the receiving country—who score in between the two previous groups
in their educational achievement (Di bartolomeo 2011).
This also holds true for italy, with the addition of some special features relat-
ing to the italian legal system. although the rights of foreign minors are formally
safeguarded by italian legislation (which requires compulsory schooling for all
minors notwithstanding their residency status, the possibility to enroll at any
time of the year, and the right of pupils not to be in a class with an excessively
high number of children), these principles often do not lay down clear instruc-
tions for their implementation (liddicoat and Díaz 2008). as a consequence,
schools know quite well what they are supposed to offer in terms of rights for
their pupils, yet they do not know how to fulfill those legal expectations (Ricucci
2008, 453) and “teachers, especially head teachers, are increasingly worried about
the practical applicability of the legislative provisions” (Gilardoni 2011, 452). in
this context of uncertainty concerning the application of regulations in practice,
the minor case of the pisacane school has risen from the working-class suburbs
of Rome to the national level.
up until the 1950s, most inhabitants of torpignattara were laborers, cleri-
cal workers, and shopkeepers. Rapid urbanization in the postwar period led to
a worsening of social conditions in the whole of Rome, with consequences that
were most evident in the suburbs. from the 1960s onward, an image of local
crime, linked to prostitution and an increase in drug-dealing, began to be associ-
ated with torpignattara; the general perception was that most criminal activity
took place around Via della marranella (see also broccolini, chapter 5), where the
pisacane school is situated.
before 1969, pisacane, built in 1928, was the only school in the district, but
the very rapid growth in the number of children enrolled (these were the years of