Inequality in education: Can Italian disadvantaged students close the gap?

• We analyse data about Italian students from the OECD-PISA 2009 edition.
• The focus is on the role of variables that could help disadvantaged students succeed.
• Not only individual-level characteristics, but also some school factors (i.e. extracurricular activities and school leadership) play a role in helping disadvantaged students.

The relationship between socio-economic status and school achievement is well documented and extensive literature indicates that students from more advantaged backgrounds perform better at school. Despite this relationship, several international assessments have highlighted that in every country there are a relevant number of “resilient students”, i.e. students from a disadvantaged socio-economic background who achieve relatively high levels of performance in terms of education. In this paper, the determinants of resilience in the Italian educational system are investigated through the analysis of data from the OECD-PISA 2009 cycle, with a specific focus on the role of school-level variables that could help more students perform to a higher standard. The aim is to target a specific category of resilient students, namely those from a low socio-economic background at both family and school level, proposing an innovative statistical procedure to derive a sample of disadvantaged students attending disadvantaged schools. After this, a multilevel logistic approach is adopted to determine which specific characteristics of students, families and schools tend to give disadvantaged students a higher probability of becoming resilient students. Our results confirm that individual-level characteristics play a role, but also that some school factors (i.e. extra-curricular activities and school leadership) are equally involved, suggesting policy- and management-related implications.