Do Schools Level the Playing Field? Longitudinal Insights into Academic Resilience in PISA

Background Academic resilience, defined as the capacity of socio-economically disadvantaged students to achieve at high academic levels, has become a key indicator in international education policy. Large-scale assessments used for international benchmarking such as the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) routinely report the prevalence of academic resilience as a summary measure of system quality, combining efficiency (high achievement) and equity (reduced socio-economic disparities). Building on this approach, a large body of comparative research has sought to identify school- and system-level factors that promote resilience implicitly characterising resilience not as an individual trait but as a property of schools and systems. However, most of this evidence is based on cross-sectional data. Such approaches may overlook other factors, particularly students’ prior achievement, attributing excessive importance to school characteristics measured at a single point in time. Methods This study investigates whether academic resilience in Italy primarily reflects school characteristics at age 15 or earlier achievement differences established in primary school. We use unique longitudinal data linking Italian students’ achievement in PISA 2022 at age 15 to their standardized test scores from primary school (INVALSI, grades 2 and 5; N = 4,890) to disentangle the roles of school-level factors and early achievement in shaping academic resilience. Academic resilience is defined as being in the lowest quartile of socio-economic status and the top quartile of mathematics achievement in grade 10. We describe achievement trajectories by socio-economic group and estimate linear probability models, accounting for sampling design, to assess the relative contribution of prior achievement and school-level factors such as disciplinary climate, truancy, school track, teacher qualifications, and socio-economic composition. Results Socio-economic disparities in mathematics achievement emerge early and widen over time. Disadvantaged students are much less likely than their advantaged peers to be top achievers in grades 2, 5, and 10, and are more likely to remain among the lowest achievers. Prior achievement in primary school is the strongest predictor of later resilience among disadvantaged students. Higher truancy and a more disadvantaged school intake are associated with lower probabilities of resilience, but most school-level factors show weak or non-significant associations. Among initially high achievers, advantaged students are better able than disadvantaged peers to sustain top performance through grade 10. Conclusions Academic resilience in Italy appears to reflect achievement differences that are established early and stratified opportunities to maintain high performance rather than the impact of school characteristics measured at age 15. Cross-sectional indicators of resilient students or resilient schools should therefore be interpreted with caution as descriptive social indicators, not as direct measures of school effectiveness, and complemented with longitudinal evidence on learning trajectories.