Search results

This research investigates the impact of managerial practices implemented by Italian school principals on students' outcomes, using micro-data provided by the National Evaluation Committee for Education (INVALSI) for 2013/14 school year.

Employing an educational production function, the authors regress a set of student and school's characteristics, enriched by information from a questionnaire filled by school principals to estimate student's score at grade 8 (last year of junior secondary school), also taking into account student's prior achievement (at grade 6 – first year of junior secondary school).

Indicators about managerial practices have positive coefficients, but low statistical significance. Stronger associations between management variables and test scores are detected for low-SES schools.

The research presented here is particularly innovative in the Italian context, where little evidence exists about the impact of managerial skills in education, though institutional reforms are leading towards a strengthening of school principal's leadership role. In this paper, the authors move a first step by describing managerial practices and their diffusion in different schools and geographical areas within the country. The authors focus the attention on the role of managerial practices (what principals do) and not on the managerial skills (what principals are able to do).

The purpose of this paper is to suggest a methodology to calculate efficiency scores for a sample of Italian primary and middle schools. The main aim is to relate these measures of efficiency to a set of “external” factors that can affect schools’ performance, such as the average socio-economic background of their students, their location in an urban/non urban setting, etc. After presenting this analysis, the paper proposes a procedure to calculate “adjusted” efficiency measures – which take in the role of external variables – in order to assess the “pure” management efficiency of each school, and so to avoid confusing the institution's performance with the aspects relating to its background.

Efficiency is defined in its technical sense that is, the ability to transform inputs (financial and human resources) into outputs (results achieved by students in standardized test scores). A two-stage quantitative procedure was used to investigate “managerial” efficiency, so that the impact of external variables on educational efficiency could be suitably taken into account.

The results show that the average efficiency score is quite high in the sample of schools considered, but potential savings can still be made: overall, with the schools’ available resources, achievement scores could be increased by about 20 percent. Efficiency and educational equity are complementary in primary public (state) schools, and the most efficient schools are those with the lowest internal variance between the students’ achievement scores; the same does not hold for middle school students’ results in mathematics. Lastly, several schools appeared to be efficient when the external variables were not taken into consideration, while their background actually favored them, and they are not efficient from a purely managerial perspective.

The most important piece of innovation is the investigation of managerial efficiency and its implications on policies. This study confirms and suggests that there could be an inverse relationship between apparent (baseline) and true (managerial) efficiency, that is, between the efficiency scores achieved before and after the “correction” made for external variables.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the gap in reading literacy of young immigrant children in Italy and examine if this gap is significantly influenced by pupils’ length of stay in Italy and country of origin.

The author estimate a standard education production function where student test performance in language is modelled as a function of the native vs immigrant first- and second-generation status and a set of additional variables that control for students, schools and catchment area characteristics. In the analysis the author use the 2010-2011 school-year data for four stages of schooling: second and fifth grade/year of primary school, sixth grade of lower secondary school and tenth grade upper secondary school.

Results confirm the presence of a significant gap between natives and immigrants students in school outcomes for all grades, with first-generation immigrants showing the largest gap. Further, comparing the results between first- and second-generation immigrant students suggests that the average significant gap observed in the first generation is mainly due to the negative performance of immigrant children newly arrived in Italy. That is, for first-generation students, closing the gap with second-generation ones seems to be, for the most part, a matter of time. At the same time, the gap between natives and second-generation immigrants remains significant in all grades. Finally, when the author compare the results across the different years, it turns out that interventions at younger ages are likely to be more effective.

Despite the availability of a rich set of controls, endogeneity issues may play a role in the analysis.

Results suggest that if the foreign children’s late arrival is the result of national migration policies on family reunification, the authorities need to carefully compare the possible benefit of delaying immigrant family reunification against the possible costs of students’ lower school performance.

Among economist, only few recent studies address the important question of whether the age at arrival and the length of stay in the host country matters for immigrants’ educational achievements. Moreover, while according to PISA 2009 results, Italy has some of the largest native-immigrant school performance gaps among OECD countries there are no studies that investigate this issue.