EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Sorting and inequality in Canadian schools

Jane Friesen and Brian Krauth

HEW from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: Researchers and educators often argue that a student's peers strongly influence his or her educational outcomes. If so, an unequal distribution of advantaged and disadvantaged students across schools in a community will leave many students doubly disadvantaged and amplify existing inequalities. We explore the relationship between the degree of sorting by socioeconomic characteristics, ethnicity and language across schools within a community and inequality as measured by the variance of standardized high school exam scores within the community. Simple cross- sectional estimates suggest a direct relationship between sorting by ethnicity and the variance of test scores, but no direct relationship between sorting by income or primary parent's education and the variance of test scores. We then implement a fixed effects estimator to control for endogeneity in the extent of sorting: the results indicate that sorting by ethnicity does not affect the variance of test scores, but that sorting by home language and primary parent's education does.

Keywords: social interactions; peer effects; sorting; classroom effects (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 32 pages
Date: 2004-08-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu, nep-lab and nep-ure
Note: Type of Document - pdf; pages: 32
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://econwpa.ub.uni-muenchen.de/econ-wp/hew/papers/0408/0408001.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Sorting and inequality in Canadian schools (2007) Downloads
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:wpa:wuwphe:0408001

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in HEW from University Library of Munich, Germany
Bibliographic data for series maintained by EconWPA (volker.schallehn@ub.uni-muenchen.de).

 
Page updated 2024-12-29
Handle: RePEc:wpa:wuwphe:0408001