Does Educational Tracking Affect Performance and Inequality? Differences-in-Differences Evidence across Countries

Eric Hanushek () and Ludger Woessmann ()

No CESifo Working Paper No. 1415, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Group Munich

Abstract: Even though some countries track students into differing-ability schools by age 10, others keep their entire secondary-school system comprehensive. To estimate the effects of such institutional differences in the face of country heterogeneity, we employ an international differences-in-differences approach. We identify tracking effects by comparing differences in outcome between primary and secondary school across tracked and non-tracked systems. Six international student assessments provide eight pairs of achievement contrasts for between 18 and 26 cross-country comparisons. The results suggest that early tracking increases educational inequality. While less clear, there is also a tendency for early tracking to reduce mean performance. Therefore, there does not appear to be any equity-efficiency trade-off.

Keywords: tracking; streaming; ability grouping; selectivity; comprehensive school system; educational performance; inequality; international student achievement test; TIMSS; PISA; PIRLS (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I20 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu, nep-eec, nep-ltv and nep-ure
Date: 2005
View list of references View citations in EconPapers

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.cesifo-group.de/DocCIDL/cesifo1_wp1415.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Does Educational Tracking Affect Performance and Inequality? Differences-in-Differences Evidence across Countries (2005)
Working Paper: Does Educational Tracking Affect Performance and Inequality? Differences-in-Differences Evidence across Countries (2005)
Working Paper: Does Educational Tracking Affect Performance and Inequality? Differences-in-Differences Evidence across Countries (2005)
Journal Article: Does Educational Tracking Affect Performance and Inequality? Differences- in-Differences Evidence Across Countries (2006)
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: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ces:ceswps:_1415

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Group Munich
Address: Poschingerstrasse 5, 81679 Munich
Series data maintained by Julio Saavedra ().