Schools with high proportions of students from single-parent families and low performance. Lower teaching and learning conditions or less social capital?

We address with the 2012 wave of the international PISA data, measuring performance and background of 15-years-old pupils in all OECD countries to unravel the mechanisms behind the negative influence of single parenthood and the proportion of single-parent families on school performances. We find that pupils living in a single-mother family do not perform significantly worse than other pupils, but only if we control for individual truancy. The school-level measure of classroom disruption and truancy mediate some of the negative effect of the school's concentration of students from single-parent families on individual students' math performance. However, the school's percentage of single-parent families remains significantly negative on individual performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]