School factors helping disadvantaged students to succeed: empirical evidence from four Italian cities

ABSTRACT

This research investigates a particular category of disadvantaged students, namely those who are able to overcome a situation of socio-economical disadvantage and obtain good academic results (here named ‘resilient students’). We have used micro-data provided by the Italian National Evaluation Committee for Education and focused on class and school-level characteristics that help disadvantaged students to become resilient students when they move from primary (grade 5) to lower secondary school (grade 6), concentrating our analysis on four major cities. We employed a probit regression and a propensity score matching model, finding that class and school factors do matter. In particular, we looked at whether the performance of their peers has a positive impact on that of disadvantaged students, estimating the increased probability of these students becoming resilient.

KEYWORDS:

• Educational equality
• students' resilience
• school factors
• probit regression
• propensity score matching

JEL:

• codes. I21
• I24

Acknowledgments

We had interesting discussions about preliminary results of this paper with J. Scott-Clayton, H. Levin and L. Stiefel who provided interesting comments and suggestions. We acknowledge the essential help by INVALSI, which sent us the original dataset, and gave useful statistical assistance (especially, we are indebted on this with P. Falzetti). Mara and Riccardo are also grateful to Teachers College, Columbia University, which hosted them during the writing of the first draft (Fall 2014). All eventual errors are our only responsibility.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Tommaso Agasisti is an Associate Professor at the Politecnico di Milano School of Management, where he teaches Public Management and serves as a co-Delegate for the Institutions and Public Administrations (I&PA) Unit of the Graduate School of Business. His research interests deal with the economics and management of public sector, with special reference to education. He is author of more than 50 papers published in international, academic journals. He serves in the Editorial Boards of the journals Educational Researcher and Tertiary Education And Management. He is member of Evaluation Committees of various private and public institutions, including universities, a Chamber of Commerce, and a Regional government.

Mara Soncin is temporary reserach fellow at Politecnico di Milano. She graduated in Management Engineering in Milan with a research on Economics of Education. Her research interests include public management and data analysis in the educational field.

Riccardo Valenti graduated in Management Engineering at Politecnico of Milano with a master’s thesis on Economics of Education. Currently, he works as business analyst in a private company.

Notes

1. Grade 6 tests were abolished in 2013/2014.

2. Bertoni et al. (2013) analysed the impact of external examiners on INVALSI test scores. They found that external monitoring lowered test scores as there is less chance to cheat. The propensity to cheat is much higher in the South – where the total effect is a reduction of 8.9% in the mean scores for schools where no external monitoring took place – compared to Northern Italy (2.6%).

3. According to this definition of resilience, we are well-aware that a student's ability to overcome a disadvantaged background cannot be reduced to his/her ability to perform well in national assessment tests but, for simplicity of the analysis and based on the data available, we decided to use this close-focused definition.

4. The only exception to this was for Turin, where one-to-one matching without replacement produced higher statistical significance.