THE POLICY OF GRADE REPETITION- DETERMINANTS AND CONSEQUENCES OF A CONTESTED EDUCATIONAL PRACTICE

The present doctoral thesis investigates grade repetition (GR) as a selection and recovery device, emphasising its implications on the broader process of transmission of educational inequalities and social stratification. The present thesis intends to add to the educational stratification literature with a systematisation of GR literature, an enrichment of the knowledge upon the understudied Italian context, and as well as a vast, novel empirical analysis of the selection, consequences and impact of this educational practice. The empirical examination utilises a vast longitudinal database of students that provides information about academic performance and socioeconomic status (SES) and migration background. The primary empirical source of this work was the set of administrative data about individual educational careers that were collected by the National Register of Students. The records refer to the Northern Italian population of upper-secondary students in four recent academic years (almost 600,000 individual students). The empirical results unambiguously illustrate that, consistently across learning contexts, GR appears to disproportionally select disadvantaged students. Even after accounting for academic performance, disadvantaged kids (i.e. with low SES and a migration background) had a drastically higher risk of GR at the end of ninth grade compared to their advantaged peers (i.e. those with high SES and a native background). The causal analysis in this work finds no convincing empirical evidence of the educative or recovery consequences of GR, which generally pushes students toward a downward change of school and unequivocally increases students’ chances to drop out from school. Moreover, students in academic tracks and culturally advantaged families tend to react to GR by changing school, while students in non-academic tracks and with no- or low-educated parents tend to drop out.