Education reform and education gaps

ABSTRACT

We estimate the causal effect of the Italian 2009 “Gelmini” education reform on four academic performance gaps relating to immigration status, gender, parental social status, and parental education. The reform led to a reduction in the number of teachers and an increase in class size. Lags in implementing the reform for different grades is used to specify a difference-in-difference identification strategy. We find that the reform had a statistically and economically significant effect on the immigrant-native gap and on the gender gap, but not on the gap between students with more and less favourable family background. Particularly, our findings show that students with an immigration background were the main losers from the Gelmini reform.

KEYWORDS:

• Education
• immigration
• reform
• difference-in-difference

SUBJECT CLASSIFICATION CODES:

• I28
• J15
• J16

Acknowledgements

We thank Heinrich Ursprung, Guido Schwerdt, Michael Becher, and the participants of the 6th International Workshop on Applied Economics of Education for helpful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ Before the reform, the minimum instruction time was 27 h/week.

² Decreto del Presidente della Repubblica 81/2009 and 89/2009.

³ The difference in the difficulty of the tests across school years and grades is elaborated upon in IRVAPP 2015.

⁴ Immigrant students are children of foreign-born non-Italian parents. The parental social-status gap measures the gap between students from low social-status families (unemployed and blue-colour workers) and other students. The parental education gap measures the gap between students from low-educated parents (less than high school diploma) and other students.