Conference Program

Due to the long-standing rural-urban education resource disparity and the school enrolment policy strictly related to household registration (hukou 户口), rural students in China find their educational opportunities are often negatively influenced by their origin (Fu 2005; Hannum, Liu, and Wang 2021; Lo 1984). They either end up studying in impoverished rural schools according to the school catchment system or attending low-quality private urban schools specifically targeting the children of migrant workers (Chen and Feng 2013; Goodburn 2009; Lai et al. 2014).

While much literature has examined the situation of rural-urban educational inequality and the exclusion of rural migrant children from China’s urban state school system (Goodburn 2016; Ma and Wu 2019; Sun et al. 2020; Wang 2008; Zhou and Rong 2011). This paper, by contrast, focuses on the as-yet unexplored "intra-system educational migrants". These rural students who successfully access cross-regional education resources using their educational capital—high grades—without being hindered by the registered location of their hukou. Their experience differs from the rural group mentioned above, those who find it difficult to access well-resourced schools. Anchored in the history of the rural-urban division of education in China and the overlooked intra-system educational migration, this research aims to answer the question: Does facilitating the movement of these students within the educational system, from under-resourced environments to well-resourced ones, improve educational social justice, or lead to further decline of county and town schools? Additionally, is there an origin-based stereotype that may detrimentally affect the intra-system educational migrants’ personal experiences in urban campuses? The answer to these questions highlights the rural-urban dimension combined with both community and individual aspects of researching educational inequality not only in China, but across the globe.

Based on the empirical study of senior secondary education enrolment in Guizhou province in China, this paper argues that the success of such intra-system educational migration has an uncertain influence on promoting educational equality from both the community and individual perspectives. From the rural community perspective, the outmigration of high-achieving students results in the ‘hollowing out’ of rural schools, leading rural education development into a vicious circle: the more high-achieving students out-migrate, the fewer resources and motivation for promoting the rural education sector (Lin 2023). From the individual perspective, primary findings in the interviews with educators in Guizhou reveal the stereotypes of rural-origin students in daily pedagogical practices, the influence of which on these students’ academic performances requires further study.

In the last twenty years, several analyses have been carried out in Italy on the variations across birth cohorts in the strength of the inequality of educational opportunities (IEO) associated with individuals’ social origins and, though less frequently, gender. Their main results can be summarized as follows. IEOs associated to class of origin decreased slightly among those born from the 1920 to the 1950 but subsequently they remained rather stable. This temporary reduction has mainly affected women and the descendants of the agricultural petty bourgeoisie. The influence of parental education on IEO slightly but monotonically declined across birth cohort, mainly among women.

Our research deepens and widens these issue. First, besides vertical aspect of IEOs associated to parental class and education among men and women, it pays attention to their horizontal aspect, that is to say the high school track attended and the field of study of university enrolment. Second, it deals with a definitely wide number of birth cohorts. Expressly, it examines, distinctly for men and women, the variations of vertical and horizontal IEOs associated to parental social class and level of schooling across 25 birth cohorts of Italians. Third, it looks at the effect on vertical and horizontal IEOs exerted, among men and among women, by the main school reforms that affected the Italian school system from 1930 onwards.

Our analyses are intended to test the following hypotheses: i) the influence of class of origin and parents' educational level on vertical IEOs displays fluctuating variations across the 25 birth cohorts of individuals born from 1902 to 2002, but has always remained remarkable; ii) the effects of class of origin on vertical IEOs have reduced more among women than among men; iii) the influence of parental education on vertical inequalities has diminished slowly and to a rather limited extent; iv) the reduction of parental level of schooling on vertical IEOs does not vary between men and women; v) horizontal IEOs between men and women undergo rather limited variations across birth cohorts; vi) the conditioning of parental class of origin and level of education over horizontal IEOs among women and among men have remained basically similar; vii) the main school reforms implemented in Italy throughout the 20th century had short-term effects on vertical and horizontal IEOs, both among men and women.

The testing of the above hypotheses is based on a national representative sample of 19,999 Italian women and men, derived from pooling the data sets of two households panel studies carried out, respectively, from 1997 to 2005 and in 2020. This data set has been analyzed through two series – one for females and one for males - of multilevel logistic regression models. In these models the individuals (first level units) are nested within birth cohorts (second level units).

Student’s well-being, which is significantly influenced by their socioeconomic status (SES), is a critical issue in the pursuit of educational equity and social justice worldwide. Although the association between subjective SES and well-being is larger than that between objective SES and well-being (for a meta-analysis, see Tan et al., 2020), the relationship between subjective SES and well-being, along with its underlying mechanisms related to school factors (e.g., the affective relationship between teachers and students) remains under-investigated. To address this gap, the current study explored the relationship between students’ subjective SES and life satisfaction, as well as the mediating role of teacher-student relationship (TSR) in this association. Participants included 844 high school students (486 girls, 57.6%) from Italy, aged 13 to 20 years (M = 16.89, SD = 1.58). In their classrooms, participants responded to demographic inquiries and completed various scales, including the MacArthur Scale of Subjective Social Status–Youth Version (Goodman et al., 2001), the Student Perception of Affective Relationship with Teacher Scale (Koomen & Jellesma, 2015), and the Satisfaction with Life Scale (Diener et al., 1985). Results revealed that students’ subjective SES positively predicted their level of life satisfaction, and subjective SES also exerted indirect influence on their life satisfaction through the mediating roles of three dimensions of TSR (i.e., closeness, conflict, and negative expectancy). These findings underscore the significant roles of students' subjective cognitive factors and social-affective factors in the school context, which may be crucial for enhancing their well-being and promoting education equity. Education practitioners, administrators, policymakers, and developers of well-being enhancement programs could benefit from the insights provided by this study.

This paper aims to analyse the joint impact that individual and ascriptive variables (gender, family background, migratory background) and contextual variables (socio-economic and cultural context, school composition and tracking, territorial differentiation) exert on the academic performance of Italian students. The aim is to investigate the mechanisms operating at both macro and micro levels and their interplay (Coleman, 1990), which shape individual choices and how the combination of these produces collective effects (micro-macro). We investigate these goals using OECD PISA data for the years 2018 and 2022. While many studies analyse the impact of factors such as students’ family background and tracking on performance (Panichella and Triventi, 2019; Bernardi and Triventi, 2020; Giancola and Salmieri, 2022), showing the multilevel and territorial structure of these inequalities from a diachronic perspective is a relatively new topic in the Italian context.

Educational inequalities at the upper secondary level arise from various factors, one of which is the territorial and school level. In our research, the territorial level, specifically geographical macro-areas, represents the highest level of aggregation for inequality factors. Individual schools represent the intermediate level. Several studies have showed the role played by the social composition of individual schools in different territories (Benadusi et al, 2010; Argentin et al, 2017). The social background of students in Italian schools plays a determining role in the level of segregation observed (Giancola and Salmieri, 2020). In Italy, schools and students' families are intertwined with diverse territorial contexts. These contexts are characterized by different socio-economic and cultural combinations, which are shaped by a range of factors, including institutions, politics, and the local environment. If this relates to the "vertical" dimension of the stratification of inequalities, then we must also consider the temporal dimension, which includes the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic such as school closures, social isolation, and the subsequent phenomena of learning loss.

The study investigates these objectives using the data collected by OECD in PISA 2018 and 2022 (OECD-PISA, 2019; 2023) and refers to performance differences in Reading among Italian upper secondary students. In the first part, the study analyses the configuration of educational inequalities within and among the five macro-territorial areas considered in the PISA survey. In this section, a multilevel regression sets (Bottoni, G., 2022) will be used to construct an interpretative model of the vertical structuring (macro-area, school, individual) of inequalities. Following this phase, we analyse the data from 2018 to 2022 to investigate whether and how school performance has changed over time in the five territorial areas. We use a pseudo-counterfactual approach and apply the Difference-In-Difference technique (Morgan, S., L. and Winship, C., 2015).

Students' endorsement of gender equality is a crucial citizenship outcome. To protect democracy, future citizens must know about civic structures and respond thoughtfully to discrimination, such as racism or sexism (Kennedy, 2019). Furthermore, traditional gender attitudes can be associated with stereotypes about gender, implying evaluative representations such as “boys are violent”, creating evaluative responses (Zosuls, Martin, Ruble, Miller, Gaertner, England & Hill, 2011), risky behaviours (Varela et al., 2022), and affect the wellbeing and academic achievement of girls at schools (Nuamah, 2019).

However, previous research on citizenship is not often concerned with this affective behavioural aspect (Isac, Sandoval-Hernández & Miranda, 2018), focusing instead on more “engagement” dimensions, such as political or civic participation (Amnå, 2012; Ekman & Amnå, 2012; Miranda et al., 2020). Besides, attitudes toward gender equality are not often seen as an outcome of inequality. Previous research has tried to identify how factors such as gender, socioeconomic status and education are related together to influence this outcome but using traditional analysis techniques such as interactions (Dotti Sani & Quaranta, 2017), carrying parsimony problems (Keller et al., 2022).

The present work has two objectives. First, frame the adhesion to attitudes toward gender equality as an inequality problem that could be understood under the approach of intersectionality. Therefore, understanding how the intersection of gender, immigrant status, and socioeconomic background (parents’ education and home literacy) can make the lack of adherence to these attitudes more pronounced. Second, the MAIHDA framework from the achievement educational field (Keller et al., n.d.) will be replicated in the area of citizenship attitudes.

MAIHDA approach uses intersectional social strata as second-level units. Therefore, the membership of individuals in these clusters implies exposure to certain advantages and disadvantages (Evans, 2019). Thus, the intersectional multilevel analysis design adopts power structures because the intersectional strata represent the level that conditions the distribution of resources and power in society (Merlo, 2018).

The data used is the International Civic and Citizenship Education Study (ICCS) 2016 (Schulz, Carstens, Losito & Fraillon, 2018), conducted by the IEA. For this research, the case of Chile was selected.

The results indicate that social groups consisting of native women with a higher socioeconomic background (parents with university education and more literacy resources at home) tend to present the highest support for attitudes toward equality. In contrast, the social category that presents a lower level of adhesion corresponds to immigrant male students whose parents have a university education, with no literacy resources at home—followed by male immigrant students whose parents do not have a university education and have from 11 to 100 books at home.

Conclusions address the strengths and weaknesses of this method and possible further research in the field.