The determinants of teacher mobility. Evidence from a panel of Italian teachers

In the Italian system teachers are allocated to schools according to a seniority-based centralized system with no role of individual schools in attracting, selecting and retaining teachers. Largely because of the rather limited pay scale, seniority-based rights to move to a particular school and geographical location represent one of the main career opportunities for tenured teachers. This paper examines the main drivers of the resulting (voluntary) mobility of Italian teachers. We find that the teachers' place of birth (after securing a tenured position, teachers try find work near their place of birth) and several features related to the student mix and the social context of the school are very important. Teachers systematically try to move away from schools where teaching is likely to be more difficult, for example where the students come from a lower socio-economic background and have poorer educational abilities even though teachers could have a more important role in boosting students' human capital accumulation. The centralized allocation system does not appear to equalize opportunities among different school environments. Furthermore, the absence of any criteria other than seniority in regulating teachers' locational preferences produces high staff turnover and a widespread lack of motivation among teachers who, all too often, are simply waiting in one school until they can move on to another.The labour market for teachers, teacher mobility, geographical mobility, school characteristics

Labour market for teachers: Demographic characteristics and allocative mechanisms

The paper considers the teachers’ labour market in Italy. The quality and motivation of teachers are certainly among the determinants of pupils’ achievement, but they are difficult to measure, so we examine the composition of the pool of teachers and their behaviour to infer information about them. We look also at the institutional features that motivate the implicit contract that drives Italian teachers' behaviour, which essentially involves low salary and correspondingly low commitment and effort. In particular we examine the mechanism that allocates teachers to schools. For each school we construct three indicators; one indicating the level of turnover, which we interpret as a source of turmoil; one that refers to the mismatch between tenured teachers and their school; and a “revealed preferences indicator” that measures the schools’ quality as evaluated by the population of tenured teachers. We measure the association at the school level of our indicators with achievement as gauged by PISA 2003. Students scores are correlated negatively to the turnover and the mismatch indicators, positively to revealed preferences.Teachers labour market, Italian educational system

High School Choices by Immigrant Students in Italy: Evidence from Administrative Data

We investigate the educational choices of first- and second-generation immigrant students at the transition between lower-secondary school and high school by exploiting a large longitudinal dataset of about 50,000 students in Italy. We find that immigrant students are less likely to choose challenging academic track high schools compared with their Italian counterparts, after controlling for household characteristics, school fixed effects, and students' performance. We show that systematic differences in teachers' feedback received by the two groups of students are an important driver of the observed differences in educational choices by immigrant and native students. In addition, after controlling for observable characteristics, we find that immigrant students are more likely to be formally advised by their teachers to choose vocational or technical high schools rather than academic tracks, especially in the case of female students, reflecting a discrimination bias that has not previously been emphasized in the literature. This suggests the role for a new dimension of policy intervention aimed at reducing the possibility of teachers' induced discrimination based on implicit stereotypes

L'interpolazione razionale e la sua validità

The rational interpolation can be used to correct anomalous values or to add missing values in a distribution of n points. Applying this method it is possible to identify a function passing by any n given points. The function is given by F(x)=S(x)/T(x) where S(x) and T(x) are two rational polynomials in x whose degrees depend on n. In this paper we present an interpolating method and we evaluate the statistical validity of the method here developed with specific application to economical, clinical and environmental data. The results show that the discrepancy between the actual value and the estimate of the same value obtained applying the rational interpolation is lower than 0,1 in 74,5% and 67,6% of cases using respectively economical and environmental data, while using clinical data the discrepancy is lower than 1 in 91% of cases

Origini sociali, consiglio orientativo e iscrizione al liceo: un'analisi basata sui dati dell'Anagrafe Studenti

International audienceThe essay investigates educational counseling - which is provided by Italian junior high schools for upper secondary education - on a national scale but also focusing on the relevant impact on students from different social backgrounds. In Italy there are essentially two tracks of upper secondary school: a "liceo", which provides a more academic training, and an "istituto", where more practical and technical disciplines are taught. Teachers' guidance on what type of high school to choose tends to favor the academic track when the students come from highly educated families. The analysis suggests that there is a distortion in teachers' advice: at similar levels of school proficiency, teachers tend to promote especially students whose parents are the most highly educated to enroll in a liceo. Counseling appears to affect high school enrolment choices and creates a significant number of side effects. The evidence shows that the greatest distortion occurs in the case of students with medium-level academic performance. The analysis also shows that, among these mid-level adolescents coming from highly educated families who enroll in a liceo, the risk of failure is significantly higher despite teachers' advice to the contrary. On the whole, there is no geographic variance, and the evidence suggests that there is a bias in teachers' advice based on the students' social origin, which reinforces social inequality. Adequate measures need to be introduced to effectively address the way in which teachers counsel students on their high school choices, in order to prevent existing educational inequalities from being reinforced across the country

Teacher motivation and student learning

Teachers’ motivation is likely to be a relevant factor affecting students’ learning. We exploit the fact that motivated teachers are typically those who have chosen to be in a given school, while teachers just waiting to move to another school may be rather demoti- vated. We link this dimension of teacher motivation – as measured by the share of teachers who asked to leave their current school – to students’ learning – as measured by their scores in reading and math standardized tests in a national examination. We find that the share of teachers applying for a transfer to another school negatively affects students’ achievements

Labour Market for Teachers: Demographic Characteristics and Allocative Mechanisms

This paper examines teachers’ labour market in Italy. Quality and motivation of teachers are receiving large attention as crucial determinants of pupils’ achievement. These characteristics are difficult to measure as testified by the lack of data. To overcome these difficulties we look at the composition of teachers’ pool and to their behaviour in the market in a first attempt to infer some information about their quality and motivation. We show that Italian teachers have traits and behaviour that are consistent with an implicit contract in which relatively low wages are compensated by low involvement in the job and low effort exerted. Next we look at the institutional features that might have motivated this implicit contract. In particular we examine the mechanism that allocates teachers to schools. For each school we construct three indicators; one indicating the level of turnover that we interpret as source of turmoil with potentially negative implications for pupils’ achievement; one that refers to the mismatch between tenured teachers and their school; the third indicator measures the quality of the school as evaluated by the whole population of tenured teachers and thus we name it “revealed preferences indicator”. We show that the geographical and across school distribution of these three indicators resemble that of perceived quality of the schools. While we do not attempt to identify, in any econometric sense, the causal link of these indicators with students performance, we do measure the association at the school level of our indicators with pupils achievement as provided by PISA 2003. It appears that our indicators are strongly correlated to the school’s performance, negatively to the turnover and to the mismatch indicator, positively to the revealed preferences expressed by the whole population of teachers. It seems that teachers know which are the best schools and gradually attempt to move there.teacher labour market, Italian educational system

Gli obiettivi formativi nella scuola primaria in un'ottica di pari opportunità. Verso i Livelli Essenziali delle Prestazioni

The changes occurring in the regulatory framework (the so-called Legge delega n.42/2009) have modified the rules of the central government transfers to the Education sector, and introduced the standard needs and the Performances'essential levels (LEP - Livelli Essenziali delle Prestazioni) as a base for fiscal federalism. This study aims at proposing an operational framework, grounded on the Equality of Opportunity framework, for the LEP's determination. The crucial issue of this literature - the detection of types and circumstances causing typization - is solved through the implementation of latent classes analysis method, instead of using an ad hoc selection of variables composing the set of circumstances. The following analysis is performed using data concerning primary school students, measured by INVALSI-SVN