The Equity Of Italian School System: A Territorial Analysis Of Socio-Economic Gradient

This paper provides an analysis of Italian students’ achievement on the basis of OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2009 data. In line with results by the previous editions, PISA 2009 underlines the lower performance of Italian 15-year olds in relation to their counterparts from most of the developed countries involved in the survey. The low achievement of Italian students, which conflicts with the high level of education expenditure per pupil, leads to analyze the determinants of their poor performance focusing on the significant relationship between literacy skills and socioeconomic status. This relationship, called socio-economic gradient, is a useful policy device because it provides a framework that emphasizes both levels of schooling outcomes and the equality of outcomes among advantaged and disadvantaged groups. Given the hierarchical nature of data (students nested into schools), we also employ multilevel statistical techniques in order to decompose and investigate the role of socio-economic context on students’ achievement. The main results highlight the stratification of students into different types of schools and the segregation of students from different family backgrounds. Therefore, a reorganization of educational investments could be required in order to readdress the available financial funds to schools which operate in poorer territorial contexts.