The Educational Value of Increased Teacher Quality in Italy

The recent poor performance of Italian students in the PISA 2018 survey, sounds a failure for whole Italian secondary education system. This trend obviously raises concerns in the school context, but also in the field of economics. In fact, literature has for long time highlighted a strong association between performance in these international assessments and economic growth. But what chiefly matters is not only the problem itself. Most surprisingly, unlike what has happened in other countries, in Italy the negative results in PISA have never unleashed significant reactions both from the policy and the public opinion. However, as pointed out by a widely cited McKensey report “the quality of an education system cannot exceed the quality of its teachers” (Barber and Mourshed, 2007, p. 40). Thus the urgency of the Italian education system refers to the most important school-related variable, the teachers. The goal of this paper is, by providing an insight of the recent international literature on the topic, to highlight the crucial role of teachers in counteracting the decline of Italian students’ achievement.