Vita e Pensiero

The present contribution analyses in a comparative way the relation between schools and migration in Europe, taking in account different experiences and societal models: the educational system of free choice in Netherlands, the recent arrival and the overlapping between language of the hosting society and the language of the main migrants groups in the case of Spain, the accumulated tradition and the permanent tensions in the management of migration in schools in the case of UK, France and Germany. The contribution focuses on two main aspect: the educational achievement of migrants and the process of educational segregation.

The essay presents and discusses some considerations concerning a sociological view of social programs evaluation. There are many reasons for a sociological perspective on evaluation to be interesting and worth to be considered: but all of them may be summarized – on one side – in the position for which social program evaluation is a special kind of applied social research and – on the other side – in the fact that considering evaluation as a ‘structured social action’ may offer significant suggestions for a better understanding of its deep nature and practical making. Assuming this perspective for dealing with evaluation underlines its being a relational construction, with a context-bounded meaning, teleologically oriented and embedded in a specific situation: with regard to this profile, a central (but not absolut) role is played by the procedures, methods, techiniques and instruments – from the social research – which allow evaluation process and results to be valid, rigorous and sound. In connextion with this last aspect, it’s the definition of evaluation as (a kind of) ‘applied social research’ to call for a priority of its methodological side but – at the same time – to link this question to the evident changes of paradigm who in the last decades affected the ways and forms in which social research is implemented.

The evaluation of Structural Funds in Italy has supported both the diffusion of evaluation activities and the use of structured evaluation strategies and methodologies. MEANS’ Guides published in 1999 contributed to open the discussion upon some key points of evaluation practice: the link with the role of rationality in decision processes, the priority of accountability or learning aims of evaluation (and the consistency of the two in everyday practice), the importance of participated evaluation and its applicability in complex programs as those supported by Structural Funds’. The importance given to monitoring and mid-term evaluation has maybe weakened the attention paid to the implementation process, while the direct link of evaluation to results has sometimes produced a «objectives- results» approach, not much inclined to «open the black box» of the programs and see how they really works and how they are improvable. Also for these reasons the contribution of sociology to the evaluation activities has been wrongly considered a marginal one: on the contrary, in a globalised society social research used in evaluation is very important to develop the awareness of how public policies really works and to help citizens’ empowerment. In this way, social research helps also citizens, stakeholders and decision makers to assume right choices.

After a short description of the history of school system evaluation, the author examines the main questions related to the implementation of the educational policies evaluation: a) the change of attitude needed inside the public administration as a consequence of the use of evaluation; b) the relationship between evaluators and policy makers; c) the goals of school system evaluation; d) the targets of evaluation; e) the relationship between external ed internal evaluation: f) the use of indicators. Finally it is presented the model followed by the school system evaluation Committee, which operates in the Trento region since 1992. The Committee has introduced gradually the idea of evaluation, beginning with the evaluation of the general system, then introducing schools self evaluation (which is now operated by almost all the Trento schools) to arrive finally to put forward the idea of school external evaluation.

The article offers an interpretation of guidance process in a sociological perspective. From this point of view, it’s clear that any approach to guidance assumed a specific conception of the linkage between individual and society. Starting form this consideration the article delineates what characterizes guidance process in the post-modern society; a society more and more fragmentated and uncertain, in which the subject seems to have increasing freedom of movement and choice. In so doing, the article proposes a new guidance approach («character-forming guidance»), considered as an appropriate aid to help the subject in making his choices: choices who are both coherent with self realization aim and responsible; that is to say, choices who keep in count both the social context to which the subject himself belongs to and the relational dynamics implied in the construction of self identity (personal and social identity).

The interview to Ulrich Beck is divided into three broad parts. In the first one, the crucial passages in his intellectual biography are reconstructed with particular reference to authors and fields of reflection that he considers essential for the structuring of his own thought. In the second part, the questions focus on the status of contemporary sociology with some refers to the decline of the previous sociological categories and with the emerging of the cosmopolitan turn into the sociological theory and methodology. The third part focuses on the present human condition and the social challenges deriving from the cosmopolitan turn, in which our lives and scholarly endeavours are embedded.