Territorial Differences in Student Performance in Portugal: The Role of Family Characteristics and School Composition

Abstract

This research represents an early attempt to disentangle the role of families, schools and regions characteristics in student performance in order to support the design of educational-related policies. Multilevel statistical models applied to PISA 2015 Portuguese data are used. The findings reveal the predictive power of socioeconomic variables operating through family background and the school composition. The regional variance explained by individual or school composition concerning the socioeconomic status ranges from 20% to 24%. The impact relies mainly on variability across schools. The variation explained due to region differences is smaller than 5%. After controlling for socioeconomic status, some regions present lower regional variance than the metropolitan region of Lisboa, showing that their students tend to achieve higher scores. Some research and policy implications are discussed. The regional dimension allows expanding the avenues to examine channels through which educational resources exert their impact on student performance. In turn, the decentralisation of educational policies seems to be required to pursuit suited local educational governance structures to address the effects of disadvantaged backgrounds.