In highly heterogeneous settings the public school system can play a critical role in enhancing human capital development by promoting the same opportunitiens and mitigating inequalities in school performances between different pupils having different social status.

For evaluating these issues, we investigated by a logistic model the school performances in the cohort enrolled during 2005 in the first class of secondary school (age: 11 years) in a Tuscany Area (the Province of Pisa), and followed for eight years, until completion of entire school grade in 2013 (age 19). The school outcome (success, failure) was regressed against a range of predictors including the pupil’s citizenship, gender, residence area, performance at the end of the third year, type of high school and the parents’ acquired level of formal education.

Results show that school performance is strongly negatively affected by gender, foreign citizenship, vocational type of school, low outcomes in the admission to higher secondary school, and low parents’ educational level.

Our results suggest that in the context considered the public school system is fairly inadequate to act against social inequalities and to prevent human capital looses.