Family Background, School-Track and Macro-Area: the Complex Chains of Education Inequalities in Italy

The main aim of this paper is to analyse the effect of social and territorial inequalities on educational outcomes in the Italian upper secondary school. For this purpose, the paper means to respond to 4 general questions: first, to what extent family background affects upper secondary school-choice and whether it has been changing during the last decade. Second, how strong is the school-track effect on learning outcomes net of other main independent variables. Third, to what extent the average family background at school level has an added role in the general explanatory model of inequalities in learning outcomes. Finally, throughout OLS models based on macro-area as a split dependent variable, we aim at accounting for structural explanatory differences between Northern and Southern regions. Findings shows a clear explanatory pattern: rather than the individual factors, it’s a chains of family background, school-choice as well as average school social status to play a determinant role in explaining learning outcomes. This explanatory pattern keeps being valid when splitting up for Italian macro areas (North-West, North-East, Centre, South and South-Islands). Two important exceptions stand out: 1) the effect of school-choice is stronger in South and South-Islands and 2) the effect of the average social status of schools is stronger in Centre and North-East