Social and Migration-related Inequality in Achievement in Primary and Secondary Education

This chapter will analyse the evolution of achievement gaps in Italy, as students move from primary to secondary schooling. Our chapter will thereby primarily address research question one, particularly the aspect of how social and migration-related gaps in educational achievement develop over time. Tackling these questions, we make use of population-level data from Italy capturing achievement of all students in Italian primary and secondary schools in a specific year by INVALSI-the Italian National Institute for the Evaluation of the School System. Combining such population-level data with a pseudo-panel design capturing end of primary schooling, lower and upper secondary schooling, our study can reveal with high precision how social and migration-related inequality in achievement evolves in the school career of students. Our study, however, was limited as to the second research question, since at the time of writing this chapter, population data could not be linked across years on the individual level. Our chapter is structured as follows. First, by providing an overview of the education system in Italy, we locate our case in the overall framework of the report. Second, we describe the population data and discuss our analytical approach implementing a pseudo-panel design. Moreover, we discuss the construction of our central dependent and independent variables. Afterwards, we present our findings on social and migration-related achievement gaps. Our analysis will also inspect the intersection of gender and migration status in patterns of inequality of educational achievement. Finally, we draw a conclusion.