IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ieb/wpaper/2012-6-doc2012-39.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Inequality in education: can Italian disadvantaged students close the gap? A focus on resilience in the Italian school system

Author

Listed:
  • Tommaso Agasisti

    () (Politecnico di Milano)

  • Sergio Longobardi

    () (University of Naples “Parthenope”)

Abstract

The relationship between socio-economic status and student achievement is well documented and a widespread literature indicates that students from more advantaged backgrounds perform better at school. Despite this relationship, several international assessments have highlighted that in each country there is a relevant proportion of “resilient students”, i.e. students who come from a disadvantaged socio-economic background but achieve relatively high levels of educational performance. In this paper, the determinants of resilience in the Italian educational system are investigated analysing data from the OECD-PISA 2009 edition, with a specific focus on the role of school-level variables that could help more students succeed. The aim is to target a specific category of resilient students, namely those who are characterised by a low socioeconomic background both at family level and at school level; therefore a novel statistical procedure is proposed to derive a sample of disadvantaged students who attend disadvantaged schools. Afterwards a multilevel logistic approach is adopted to determine which characteristics of students, families and schools, tend to give disadvantaged students a higher probability of becoming a resilient. Our results confirm that not only individual-level characteristics, but also some school factors (i.e. extracurricular activities and school leadership) play a role in this direction, suggesting policy and managerial implications.

Suggested Citation

  • Tommaso Agasisti & Sergio Longobardi, 2012. "Inequality in education: can Italian disadvantaged students close the gap? A focus on resilience in the Italian school system," Working Papers 2012/39, Institut d'Economia de Barcelona (IEB).
    • Handle: RePEc:ieb:wpaper:2012/6/doc2012-39
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.ieb.ub.edu/phocadownload/documentostrabajo/doc2012-39.pdf
    Download Restriction: no

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Ewijk, R. van & Sleegers, P, "undated". "The effect of peer socioeconomic status on student achievement: a meta-analysis," Working Papers 20, Top Institute for Evidence Based Education Research.
    2. Giorgio Brunello & Daniele Checchi, 2007. "Does school tracking affect equality of opportunity? New international evidence," Economic Policy, CEPR;CES;MSH, vol. 22, pages 781-861, October.
    3. Holmlund, Helena & McNally, Sandra & Viarengo, Martina, 2010. "Does money matter for schools?," Economics of Education Review, Elsevier, vol. 29(6), pages 1154-1164, December.
    4. Rosalind Levacic & Stephen Machin & David Reynolds & Anna Vignoles & James Walker, 2000. "The Relationship between Resource Allocation and Pupil Attainment: A Review," CEE Discussion Papers 0002, Centre for the Economics of Education, LSE.
    5. Bratti, Massimiliano & Checchi, Daniele & Filippin, Antonio, 2007. "Territorial Differences in Italian Students’ Mathematical Competencies: Evidence from PISA 2003," IZA Discussion Papers 2603, Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA).
    6. repec:lan:wpaper:1092 is not listed on IDEAS
    7. Bradley, Steve & Taylor, Jim, 1998. "The Effect of School Size on Exam Performance in Secondary Schools," Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, Department of Economics, University of Oxford, vol. 60(3), pages 291-324, August.
    8. Rosalind Levacic & Anna Vignoles, 2002. "Researching the Links between School Resources and Student Outcomes in the UK: A Review of Issues and Evidence," Education Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 10(3), pages 313-331.
    9. Hanushek, Eric A, 1986. "The Economics of Schooling: Production and Efficiency in Public Schools," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 24(3), pages 1141-1177, September.
    10. repec:lan:wpaper:1016 is not listed on IDEAS
    11. John Ruggiero & Donald F. Vitaliano, 1999. "Assessing The Efficiency Of Public Schools Using Data Envelopment Analysis And Frontier Regression," Contemporary Economic Policy, Western Economic Association International, vol. 17(3), pages 321-331, July.
    12. Ladd, Helen F. & Walsh, Randall P., 2002. "Implementing value-added measures of school effectiveness: getting the incentives right," Economics of Education Review, Elsevier, vol. 21(1), pages 1-17, February.
    13. repec:lan:wpaper:1015 is not listed on IDEAS
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Inequality; disadvantaged schools; resilient students; school-level policies; educational production functions;

    JEL classification:

    • I21 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education - - - Analysis of Education

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ieb:wpaper:2012/6/doc2012-39. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: (). General contact details of provider: http://edirc.repec.org/data/iebubes.html .

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service hosted by the Research Division of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis . RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.