AJE Feature | What do European reforms tell us about the impact of early tracking on socioeconomic inequalities in educational attainment? by Herman G. van de Werfhorst

Full length article “H.G. Early Tracking and Social Inequality in Educational Attainment: Educational Reforms in 21 European Countries” by Van de Werfhost published by the American Journal of Education available here.

While tracking has been a well-known phenomenon in the American educational system for some time, in some countries the separation of students for different school careers is much stronger and rigid than in the U.S. In countries like Germany and the Netherlands, students are sorted into separate schools based on their learning potential as early as the age of 10 or 12. Other societies keep their students together much longer, and less segregated than in the U.S. (such as Denmark, Sweden and France).

A well-known fact is that inequalities in student achievement are higher in systems where students are tracked into separate schools earlier. Students of different socioeconomic backgrounds enter different environments with different opportunities to learn (Schmidt et al. 2015). The role of parents for student decision making is larger if students are younger, and disadvantaged children have not had sufficient time to show their potential in early-tracking systems. 

Comparing countries and time periods 

The extent to which (early) tracking magnifies inequalities has mostly been studied by comparing countries with different educational levels at one point in time, or by comparing different cohorts within countries that have been educated under different tracking regimes due to educational reforms. Furthermore, existing research mostly focuses on student achievement during high school (like in mathematics), while arguably more important inequalities may emerge in the likelihood to complete high school, or to complete college. The current study employs a combination of comparative and reform studies for 21 European countries, by comparing cohorts in countries where tracking age reforms took place to the same cohorts in countries where no reforms took place. 

Such a comparative reform design provides stronger evidence for the question whether later tracking reduces inequalities by socioeconomic background, as stable country differences (e.g. related to culture, history, or political economy) are filtered out, and overall international trends too. The analysis focused on educational attainment, more specifically on the likelihood to complete high school, the likelihood to complete college (conditional on having completed high school), and the total number of years of schooling students attained. Because educational attainment is measured well in the European Social Surveys (in country-specific form, and separately for levels of attainment and years of schooling), I could use this source to assess to what extent later tracking reduces inequalities. Moreover, I was able to compare cohorts born between 1925 and 1989, enabling us to examine many policy reforms (which were collected by Braga et al. 2013).  

Later tracking came with lower socioeconomic inequalities 

The results showed that reforms to later tracking came with lower inequalities by parental occupational class, but not by parental education. A reduction in socioeconomic inequalities by parental class was found because children of the working classes improved their chances to graduate from high school and attain more years of education, and because children of managers lost some of their advantage. Children of professionals were less strongly affected by the reforms. Thus, in families most strongly oriented to education (i.e high parental education or the professional class), later tracking hardly affected children’s advantageous position. These social groups find ways to stay ahead independent of how the educational system is organized. A reduction of inequalities was, in other words, mostly achieved through groups less strongly attached to education. 

The life course hypothesis revisited

The age at which students are separated into distinct learning environments makes a difference for the inequalities we observe. A potential explanation is offered by the life course hypothesis (Blossfeld and Shavit 1993), which states that inequalities are smaller in educational decisions made later in the school career. While the life course hypothesis has mostly been tested by comparing educational transitions across the school career, an alternative test is to compare systems that vary in the timing at which educational decisions are enforced upon families. Traditional tests of the life course hypothesis suffer from an alternative explanation for smaller effects across the school career, namely increased homogeneity of the student population across transitions (Mare 1993). My transition model approach (inspired by Holm and Jaeger 2011) incorporated heterogeneous selection. A comparative analysis of the transition to completing high school and college showed that the postponement of tracking mostly affected inequalities in the transition to high school. Conditional on having completed high school, there was only a small reduction of inequality in completing college.  

Relevance for the United States

Based on the results on European reforms, a more general life course hypothesis can be formulated that is also relevant for American education. First of all, for American high schools it may be relevant to know that early tracking may harm equal opportunities, confirming earlier American scholarship (e.g. Gamoran and Mare 1989; Hallinan 1994; Lucas 2001). But also concerning other developments in the U.S. it is relevant to know that early separation of children may be harmful. School segregation is on the rise, and if this comes with different opportunities to learn, socioeconomic inequalities may go up (Reardon and Owens 2014). Promoting school choice may spur separation by social class, potentially increasing socioeconomic inequalities. Rising inequalities in the American system may then not only be explained by rising income inequality in households, but may be related to the sorting process into different learning environments too.   

Herman van de Werfhorst is professor of sociology at the University of Amsterdam.

References

Blossfeld, Hans-Peter and Yossi Shavit. 1993. “Persisting Barriers. Changes in Educational Opportunities in Thirteen Countries.” In Persistent Inequality. A Comparative Study of Educational Attainment in Thirteen Countries, ed. Y. Shavit and H.-P. Blossfeld, 1-23. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

Braga, Michela, Daniele Checchi, and Elena Meschi. 2013. “Educational Policies in a Long-Run Perspective.” Economic Policy28(73):45–100.

Gamoran, Adam and Robert D. Mare. 1989. “Secondary School Tracking and Educational Inequality: Compensation, Reinforcement, or Neutrality?” American Journal of Sociology94(5):1146–83.

Hallinan, Maureen T. 1994. “School Differences in Tracking Effects on Achievement.” Social Forces72(3):799–820.

Holm, Anders and Mads Meier Jaeger. 2011. “Dealing with Selection Bias in Educational Transition Models: The Bivariate Probit Selection Model.” Research in Social Stratification and Mobility29(3):311–22.

Lucas, Samuel R. 2001. “Effectively Maintained Inequality: Education Transitions, Track Mobility, and Social Background Effects.” American Journal of Sociology106(6):1642–90.

Mare, Robert D. 1993. “Educational Stratification on Observed and Unobserved Components of Family Background.” In Persistent Inequality. Changing Educational Attainment in Thirteen Countries, ed. Yossi Shavit and Hans-Peter Blossfeld, 351–76. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

Reardon, Sean F. and Ann Owens. 2014. “60 Years After Brown: Trends and Consequences of School Segregation.” Annual Review of Sociology40(1):199–218.

Schmidt, William H., Nathan A. Burroughs, Pablo Zoido, and Richard T. Houang. 2015. “The Role of Schooling in Perpetuating Educational Inequality An International Perspective.” Educational Researcher44(7):371–86.