Home-school distance among native and immigrant-origin lower secondary students in urban Northern Italy

ABSTRACT

Residential proximity to schools is a relatively unexplored topic, especially as concerns its link to socially disadvantaged and immigrant-origin students. Such students may be more likely to attend the nearest school to their home, since their (families’) knowledge of school system is weak and school selection depends more on convenience than on evaluation of multiple schools’ pros and cons. This paper examines if, and to what extent, home-school distance differentiates native and immigrant-origin students’ educational experiences. Analyses – carried out in two Northern Italian cities (Milan and Bologna) and referring to students enrolled in the compulsory and comprehensive final year of lower secondary education in the 2014/15 school year – focus on minimum and actual home-school distances, the share of students engaging in ‘flight’ from the nearest school, and the appeal exerted by schools on culturally advantaged families. Results show that native and immigrant-origin students’ school proximity is almost the same. Nonetheless, natives are more likely to attend schools that are farther from home; noteworthy differences are detectable in some disadvantaged areas. Native families, especially in Milan, are more likely to ‘flee’ towards non-state schools, which display a particularly strong appeal towards native families featuring high parental education status.

KEYWORDS:

• Home-school distance
• immigrant-origin students
• parental level of education
• lower secondary education
• Italy

Acknowledgements

A preliminary version of this article was presented at the 3rd annual conference of the Italian Society of Economic Sociology on ‘Development and Inequality’ (and more precisely in the panel on ‘Immigration, Integration and Inequality: Second Generations, Schools and the Labour Market’) held in Naples from January 31 to February 2, 2019. The authors thank the panel’s participants for their comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data availability statement

The data analysed in this study may be requested via the INVALSI, MIUR and ISTAT repositories: https://www.invalsi.it/invalsi/index.php; https://www.miur.gov.it/accesso; https://contact.istat.it/.

Notes

1 Since 2012, the increase of foreign population has been persistent but moderate, due to the effect of the 2008 economic crisis and the increase in the number of foreign-origin individuals achieving Italian citizenship (Fondazione ISMU 2012, 2017).

2 See also Cordini, Parma, and Ranci (2019) as regards primary schools in Milan. Other similar efforts not completely focused on school segregation are Torri and Vitale (2008); Mingione, Borlini, and Vitale (2008); Rimoldi and Terzera (2017).

3 Actually, a (relatively problematic) centre/periphery segregation divide can be observed: foreigners are more concentrated in some suburban areas, but migratory experience does not necessarily coincide with socio-economic disadvantage.

4 Officially recognised schools are non-state schools and may be supported by local public authorities or private actors. On the basis of law no. 62/2000, these schools are ‘officially recognised’ by the Ministry of Education, and educational credentials awarded by these institutions are formally considered equivalent to those of state schools.

5 The cited study is based on the same data-base used here, but focuses only on the city of Bologna and uses qualitative analyses when focusing on school profiles.

6 It is important to reiterate that lower secondary schooling is compulsory and features a basically undifferentiated curriculum across different schools.

7 The index contemplates three schools because three is the lowest value ensuring that almost all schools would have at least one state school among their competitors.

8 The setting of the two thresholds at one-half standard deviation below and above the mean reflects a criterion commonly used in the definition of overeducation (Morrison and Lichter 1988; Ortiz and Kucel 2008). Schools with less than 50 enrolled students and/or for which no information for parental education status was missing for over 60% of pupils were not considered in this set of analyses, leading to the exclusion of 38 schools in Milan and 7 in Bologna.

9 Only the closest school is considered in that the additional travel distance required from the nearest to the second most proximate school is, on average, greater than the additional distances recorded for the following rank orders: setting a different threshold would mean defining relatively ‘difficult’ choices as ‘non-flight’. The reasoning applied here is, thus, different from the one used in developing the A index.

10 Similar results obtain if schools’ state / non-state status – which can arguably be interpreted as an intervening variable – is omitted from the model.

11 This may be due, in part, to the fact that 15-year-olds typically attend track-specific upper secondary schools and that parents probably incorporate track considerations into their decisions to a much greater degree than proximity of schools; yet Italian upper secondary education’s track structure is hardly unique and does not appear to adequately justify the difference.

Additional information

Funding

The work presented here stems from a research project titled ‘Social Exclusion and Selection in Lower Secondary Education: School Segregation Dynamics and Criteria Concerning Immigrant-Origin Students’ and financed by the University of Bologna through its Alma Idea grant programme supporting basic research.