Unfortunately, family status of origin is still a good predictor of educational success. At the national level, 27.5% of students from disadvantaged families have low achievement in the eighth grade compared to 4.5% of advantaged peers. The relationship also emerges at the local level, comparing incomes and INVALSI test results: Crotone is the area with the lowest learning levels and first in terms of the share of taxpayers with less than 10 thousand euros. This is what emerges from an analysis of the Observatory on Educational Poverty carried out by the Openpolis Foundation with the social enterprise Con i Bambini as part of the fund for the fight against child educational poverty. Cultural factors also play a key role: for example, in a family where parents do not read, children will also be less often readers. According to ISTAT research data from 2021, 77.4% of children who grow up in a family of readers read. When neither parent reads, the share drops to 35.4%. Those born into a socio-economically-culturally disadvantaged family, therefore, are more often left behind. The research shows that, by the eighth grade, nearly 19% of students who come from families in the highest socio-economic-cultural bracket reach the highest level (fifth) in proficiency in Italian. In contrast, the share plummets to 7.1% among pupils from lower-middle family status and even 3.4% among those from lower status. 27.5% of disadvantaged students in the eighth grade perform at the lowest level in the INVALSI tests in Italian.
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