No Evidence that Strict Educational Tracking Improves Student Performance through Classroom Homogeneity: A Critical Reanalysis of Esser and Seuring (2020)

Keine Belege für leistungsfördernde Effekte von strikter Leistungsdifferenzierung durch kognitive Homogenisierung: Eine kritische Reanalyse von Esser und Seuring (2020)

Jan Paul Heisig and Sönke Hendrik Matthewes

EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters, 2022, vol. 51, issue 1, 99-111

Abstract: In a recent contribution to this journal, Esser and Seuring (2020) draw on data from the National Educational Panel Study to attack the widespread view that tracking in lower secondary education exacerbates inequalities in student outcomes without improving average student performance. Exploiting variation in the strictness of tracking across 13 of the 16 German federal states (e. g., whether teacher recommendations are binding), Esser and Seuring claim to demonstrate that stricter tracking after grade 4 results in better performance in grade 7 and that this can be attributed to the greater homogeneity of classrooms under strict tracking. We show these conclusions to be untenable: Esser and Seuring’s measures of classroom composition are highly dubious because the number of observed students is very small for many classrooms. Even when we adopt their classroom composition measures, simple corrections and extensions of their analysis reveal that there is no meaningful evidence for a positive relationship between classroom homogeneity and student achievement – the channel supposed to mediate the alleged positive effect of strict tracking. We go on to show that students from more strictly tracking states perform better already at the start of tracking (grade 5), which casts further doubt on the alleged positive effect of strict tracking on learning progress and leaves selection or anticipation effects as more plausible explanations. On a conceptual level, we emphasize that Esser and Seuring’s analysis is limited to states that implement different forms of early tracking and cannot inform us about the relative performance of comprehensive and tracked systems that is the focus of most prior research.

Keywords: ability tracking; secondary education systems; peer effects; classroom composition; mediation analysis; replication; Leistungsdifferenzierung; Sekundarbildungssysteme; Peer-Effekte; Klassenzusammensetzung; Mediationsanalyse; Replikation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/262217/1/F ... No-evidence-that.pdf (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:zbw:espost:262217

DOI: 10.1515/zfsoz-2022-0001

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters from ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().