Better than whom? Methodological and substantial considerations emerged while going beyond a plain comparison of school performance in Trentino and in nearby provinces.

The chapter aims to analyse the specificity of the case of the Autonomous province of Trento, questioning whether it is possible to speak of Trentino as an area of high learning. We analyse two dimensions related to school performance: the learning in Italian and Mathematics and social inequalities based on gender, migration background and parental education. The analyti-cal strategy is based on the comparison of the province of Trento with the rest of the country, the North-East and the neighbouring provinces, controlling for a relevant set of observed characteristics to obtain estimates not biased by compositional effects. The results show that the advantage of Trentino disappears substantially once the comparison is made with contiguous geo-graphical areas and that even in terms of equity the situation is similar with respect to the neighbouring provinces.