Reducing the Gap? The Effects of EU Funds for Improving Education in Southern Italy

• In Event: The Effectiveness of Italian Educational Policies Toward Reaching the ET2020 (Education and Training 2020) European Objectives in Education and Training

Abstract

Objectives
In the past decades, a substantive stream of empirical literature has discussed the effects of input-based school policies on student achievement, and the association between school resources and student results is often elusive.
Still, to strengthen economic and social cohesion by correcting imbalances between its regions, the European Union addresses substantial shares of its budgets to economically depressed regions (the so-called ERDF funds). In the 7th Framework Program 2007-2013 (FP7), four Italian regions had access to these funds, and 3.8 billion euros have been devoted to improving the quality of education.
This paper provides new empirical evidence on the effects of increased school resources in improving student results.

Theoretical framework
Looking at OECD-PISA scores between 2006 and 2009, the results of the 15-years-old students in these regions have improved in absolute terms and relative to the rest of the country.
This paper assesses whether the increased availability of school resources have indeed had any effect on student proficiency.

Methods
Although only 4 Regions receive the FP7 extra funding, the background socioeconomic conditions are very similar in the adjacent regions. Such geographical discontinuities in the access to the funding allow for examining the effect of increased school resources on student achievement.
In the OECD-PISA 2009 survey, Italy used an oversampling strategy to obtain regionally representative samples for all the 20 Italian regions. The schools of the PISA-sample for the 4 regions are the treatment group. A control group is chosen via matching on observables in the PISA-sample-schools of adjacent regions.
PISA results provide information for school-year 2008-09, INVALSI national assessment of student achievement at grade 10 provides student results for the same schools for school-year 2010-11.
The Average Treatment effect on the Treated (ATT) is estimated using a difference-in-differences estimator and allows us to assess the causal effect of the access to extra resources.

Data sources
- OECD-PISA 2009 student scores and school and student background questionnaires;
- INVALSI data on the national assessment of student achievement at grade 10 as well as student background information;
- administrative information on school budgets and (for the treated) access to extra EU funds;

Results
The national assessment of student achievement was conducted in May and the data will be available from October.
The analysis will allow us to investigate the following key points:
• In this 3 years span, the results of the PISA schools in the 4 regions have changed?
• The extra funding is streamed to different directions (teacher training, laboratories, school buildings, initiatives for students etc). Is the different targeting anyhow related to student achievement?

Significance
The work sheds some new light on the effectiveness ERDF funds for education, where only very limited evidence is available.
Some evidence exists that these funds are effective when interacting variables measuring institutional quality are taken into account. At EU level, Italy appears to be managing effectively such additional funding in education through its centralized program and the paper provides some new empirical grounds for discussing this claim.

Authors

• Patrizia Falzetti, Istituto nazionale per la valutazione del sistema educativo di istruzione e di formazione

• Laura Palmerio, Istituto nazionale per la valutazione del sistema educativo di istruzione e di formazione

• Barbara Romano, University of Genova

• Daniele Vidoni, Istituto nazionale per la valutazione del sistema educativo di istruzione e di formazione