Abstract

This paper examines the distribution and the degree of educational poverty in some grades of the compulsory school in Italy by using, as a source of information, standardized INVALSI test results for the period 2012-2013. Policy makers who need to pay attention to different aspects of poverty - incidence, intensity and severity - find in this study useful elements to both draw a detailed picture of the degree of poverty relative to student learning, and detect the grades of the educational system where outcomes are more critical. The analysis is accomplished by adopting both one-dimensional and multidimensional approaches to deprivation. In the latter case, this paper presents empirical results of a range of poverty measures by using some indicators of the class of multidimensional indexes proposed by Alkire and Foster (2011) and Bourguignon and Chakravarty (2003), applied for the first time in the analysis of cognitive skills.