Sorting and Private Education in Italy

The economics and politics of private education are complicated and controversial. Recent efficiency-oriented reforms of public transportation, urban sanitation, health care and even prison administration have involved the replacement of public provision of goods and services with private provision at subsidised rates. The question of whether governments should issue tax-financed vouchers to private non-profit suppliers of education is particularly topical in Italy, where the constitution stipulates that state and private schools have equal rights but the latter should not be state-funded. Regional governments, however, have begun to issue means-tested vouchers to offset either state or private schooling costs. Moreover the education minister in the Berlusconi government, Letizia Moratti, was among the signatories of the 1999 ‘Scuola Libera’ manifesto, which advocated the radical privatisation of schooling provision in Italy.1