The study of the territorial difference in educational achievement is a widely debated topic, in particular in Italy for the presence of the well-known strong regional disparities. National and international large scale assessments confirmed that the main characteristic of the Italian school system is the geographical cleavage between North and South. Policymakers have pressing needs to find solutions to reduce geographical disparities. In this study, we investigate the spatial disparities of academic achievement from a new perspective, assuming that the relationship between academic achievement and predictors varies across Italy. Our aim is to examine the extent of the spatial disparities in the relationship between academic achievement and some school-level factors related to inequalities in educational outcomes, moving beyond the regional administrative confines, in order to identify new spatial patterns. We exploited the reading standardized tests administered by INVALSI in 2018–2019 focusing on the 8th-grade students. Crucial to our contribution is the use of the geographically weighted regression and the k-mean clustering, which allows studying the spatial variability of the impact of the school-level factors on academic achievement and to gather schools in new spatial clusters. The findings of this paper demonstrate the necessity to design a more specific education policy and support the identification of the main critical factors for different geographical areas.

This paper suggests that some Italian junior secondary schools are likely to practise sorting between classes, and proposes an indicator to measure this practice. The impact of “informal” sorting on the students’ achievement is evaluated through an appropriate Instrumental Variables (IV) approach. The results suggest that this practice harms the students’ results in Reading, as measured through standardised test scores. Heterogeneity of this effect is then explored, considering different school types as well as different student characteristics. Overall, practising sorting within schools helps to replicate existing inequality through unequal educational opportunities

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PurposeThis 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.Design/methodology/approachEmploying 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).FindingsIndicators about managerial practices have positive coefficients, but low statistical significance. Stronger associations between management variables and test scores are detected for low-SES schools.Originality/valueThe 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).