Track placement, school environments, and achievement gaps: identifying the drivers of the academic track advantage in Italy

Abstract Educational tracking shapes students’ learning opportunities, yet isolating its effects from prior selection remains a key challenge in large-scale assessment research. This study examines both the size and the mechanisms of academic-track advantages by integrating longitudinal population-level administrative data from INVALSI with school- and student-level indicators from PISA 2018 in Italy. Focusing on lyceums versus technical schools, we exploit rich pre-tracking information on achievement, socio-demographic background, and early attitudes, and apply entropy balancing to adjust for selection into tracks. Results show that achievement gaps at Grade 10 are large across domains, but substantially reduced once differences in prior competencies and backgrounds are accounted for. Nonetheless, a meaningful academic-track advantage persists after balancing. Decomposition analyses indicate that this residual gap is largely explained by differences in school environments, particularly classroom academic and SES composition alongside school climate, while instructional practices and organizational policies or school resources contribute little on average. The findings support a dual interpretation of tracking effects, combining cumulative selection and exposure to differentiated learning contexts, and highlight the value of linking administrative panels with international assessment data to study both outcomes and mechanisms of educational stratification.