Place, race and language: Secondary school 'choice' in South Africa's Gauteng province

Eldridge Moses ()
Additional contact information
Eldridge Moses: Department of Economics and ReSEP, Stellenbosch University

No 03/2023, Working Papers from Stellenbosch University, Department of Economics

Abstract: This paper uses 2021 and 2022 school-level administration data to examine the relationship between primary and high school locations to determine whether high-quality secondary schools still mostly draw learners selectively from nearby 'feeder' primary schools, and as a result affect racial diversity in enrolments. We find that race is still a powerful predictor of access to high-quality secondary schools in South Africa. Gauteng's poorest-performing schools are home to mostly Black and Coloured learners, while its best-performing schools have an over-representation of White and Asian/Indian learners (relative to their overall population proportions in Gauteng). The findings in this paper suggest that the uneven distributions of high-quality schools, feeder zone rules and affordability constraints prevent many South African learners from enrolling in high-quality schools.

Keywords: School choice; education quality; South Africa; inequality (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I24 I25 I28 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.ekon.sun.ac.za/wpapers/2023/wp032023/wp032023-1.pdf First version, 2023 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sza:wpaper:wpapers379

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Stellenbosch University, Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Melt van Schoor ().