School choices and educational performances in Italy: the effects of parental homogamy along educational tracks

Author(s):

Luisa De Vita(presenting / submitting)Orazio Giancola(presenting)Luca Salmieri

Conference:

ECER 2016

Network:

09. Assessment, Evaluation, Testing and Measurement

Format:

Paper

Session Information

09 SES 01 C, Investigating Relations of Student, School and Context Variables With Students’ Attitudes, Behaviors and Academic Performance

Paper Session

Time:

2016-08-23

13:15-14:45

Room:

NM-F107

Chair:

Tobias C. Stubbe

Contribution

The most basic and consistent finding in the stratification and education literature is the existence of strong social inequalities in educational outcomes. It is uncontroversial that individual ability is not the only determinant of children’s educational success, but that instead a multitude of social background characteristics affect children’s educational careers. Plenty of researchers have underlined the key role of upper secondary school choices in setting the students pathways toward further education and transition to work. Nevertheless exploration in this issue is far from being completed. In whichever way the influence of parental characteristics on educational success is conceptualized, it shows to be a strong and significant one. Thus, the question is not whether parental characteristics influence students ‘educational success but to what degree they do. This latter question then invites to investigate various family factors and among those the role of social homogamy. From one side, the expanded access to upper secondary schools seems to have only partially reduced the vertical differentiation (in terms of level of education attained), for the other side, differentiation in horizontal choices seems to reproduce old and new inequalities. Several empirical evidences based on PISA data from different waves (from the first in 2000 to the last one in 2012), proves that Italian students social background has a limited direct effect on cognitive performances (measured by ESCS - Index of Economic, Social and Cultural Status impact on test scores) but, at the same time, also a strong effect on variance among type of schools (school tracks). We know that according to GERESE (2005) and Gorard (2002) this kind of variability is an indirect measure of social inequality mediated by academic segregation. In our paper we focus on educational and occupational homogamy/ heterogamy in students ‘parents family in order to ascertain whether, how and which parent credentials have a positive effect on school choice and after on cognitive performance.

Method

The analyses presented here include data with complete information on students own and their parents’ educational attainment. OECD-PISA international data and Italy INVALSI data on the 10th year of schooling, provided a very large sample. We have used ascribed variables (family background), broken down by level of education and by occupational position of the mother and the father of the student. We also used acquisitive variables such as former schooling curriculum (performances, failures, changed schools) and contextual variables such as geographical location, size of the city. Analyses are based on 3 steps. In the first one we measured and described homogamy/heterogamy between mothers and fathers attained educational levels, stratified by three levels - high, medium and low – obtaining a distribution of cases along nine categories (homogamy at high educational attainment, at medium and low educational attainment and the six types of heterogamy, i.e. mother high-father medium, mother high-father low, mother medium-father low, father high-mother medium, father medium-mother low). We carried out the same processing for occupational stratification, recoded in four the category from ISCO classification. We obtained an estimation of educational and occupational homogamy among parents of our students’ sample. In the second step, we adopted a synthesis technique for nominal categorical variables (MCA, Multiple Correspondence Analysis): educational and occupational positions of both parents were made to interact between them simultaneously in order to identify different combinations. Once we identified the latent factors defining the spatial configuration of the various components of the students' family background, illustrative variable such as gender, school tracks and cognitive performance recorded by proficiency PISA levels have been associated to the background variables used in the first step. The result is a mapping of the whole set of relationships between family background in terms of heterogamy vs homogamy and students choices and performances, according to gender. The third and final step is based on a switch from a synthetic to an analytical exercise: we exported the outputs from second step in the form of new independent variables, i.e. categorization of heterogamy vs homogamy. We then observed its impact on children school choices (throughout a multinomial regression model) and finally on children cognitive performance (throughout a multiple regression model including school choices, i.e. controlling for school choices-performances correlation). We replicated the exercise for male and female students, in order to estimate whether and how much parental homogamy and school track impact on performance according to gender.

Expected Outcomes

We find out that educational heterogamy, especially when mothers educational level is poor, lowers children educational performances and at a greater extent lowers children likeliness to attend high-status schools (general track as “Liceo” in the Italian case). Furthermore it seems that the occupational complexity of mother's work positively affects the home environments mothers provide for their children indirectly pushing them toward higher educational attainments. Findings also suggest that school capital effects are modest in size while family high homogamy capital effects are stronger; combinations of school and homogamy capital boost or modify additive findings. This seems to be particularly strong when homogamy concerns high-educated parents. We sketch directions for future research and discuss the usefulness of analysing school determinants and types of parents homogamy as parallel mechanism influencing each other.

References

Ballarino, G., Bernardi, F., Requena, M. e Schadee, H. (2009). Persistent inequalities? Expansion of education and class inequality in Italy and Spain. European Sociological Review, 25(1), 123-138. Giorgio Brunello, Daniele Checchi Does school tracking affect equality of opportunity? New international evidence Economic Policy, Volume 22, Issue 52, pages 781–861, October 2007 Cameron, S.V. e Heckman, J.J. (1998). Life Cycle Schooling and Dynamic Selection Bias: Models and Evidence for Five Cohorts of. The Journal of Political Economy, 106(2), 262-333. Checchi, D. e Flabbi, L. (2007). Intergenerational mobility and schooling decisions in Germany and Italy: The impact of secondary school tracks. IZA Discussion Paper No. 2876. Duru-Bellat M., Suschaut B. (2006), Organizzazione del sistema scolastico e disuguaglianze sociali di rendimento scolastico:gli insegnamenti dell’Indagine PISA2000, in Benadusi L., Bottani N. (eds.), Uguaglianza ed equità nella scuola, Milano, Erickson. Gamoran, A. (1992), The variable effects of high school tracking, Amercan Sociological Review, 57 (6), 812-828 Gambetta, D. (1987). Were They Pushed or Did They Jump?, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. GERESE (Groupe Européen de Recherche sur l’Équité des Systèmes Éducatifs) (2005), “L'équité des systèmes éducatifs européens. Un ensemble d’indicateurs”, Service de pédagogie théorique et expérimentale, Université de Liège. Gorard, S. & Taylor, C. (2002), What is segregation? A comparison of measures in terms of strong and weak compositional invariance, Sociology, 36 (4), 875-895 Giancola, O., 2010, "Performance e disuguaglianze nei sistemi educativi Europei. Un tentativo di spiegazione del 'caso' italiano". Serie "Quaderni di Ricerca del Dipartimento Innovazione e Societa', "Sapienza" Universita' di Roma", Quaderno n.31, Roma, Aracne Editrice. Giancola O., Fornari R., "Policies for decentralization, school autonomy and inequalities in educational performance among the Italian regions. Empirical evidence from Pisa 2006",Vol.8, N.2 (2011) di Italian Journal Of Sociology Of Education. Giancola O. & Viteritti A.(2014), Distal and Proximal Vision: a multi-perspective research in sociology of education European Educational Research Journal Volume 13 Number 1 2014 Eurydice (2013), The structure of the European education systems 2013/2014, European Commission Iannelli C. (2002), Parental education and young people’s educational and labour market outcomes: a comparison across Europe in Kogan I., Muller W., “School-to-work transitions in Europe: Analyses of the EULFS 2000 Ad hoc module”, Mannheimer Zentrum fur Europaische Sozialforschung. Manzo, G. (2009). La spirale des inégalités: choix scolaires en France et en Italie au XXe siècle. Presses de l'université Paris-Sorbonne. Woessmann, L. (2009). International Evidence on School Tracking: A Review. CESifo DICE Report, 1, pp. 26-34

Author Information

Luisa De Vita (presenting / submitting)

Sapienza university of Rome

Social science and economics

rome

Orazio Giancola (presenting)

Dipartimento di Scienze Sociali ed Economiche Sapienza università di Roma Italy

Luca Salmieri