Abstract
Whether early school stratification is conducive or detrimental to scholastic performance has been subject to controversial debates in educational policy and science across many countries. We exploit a reform in Lower Saxony, Germany, where performance based tracking was preponed from grade 7 to grade 5 in 2004, i.e. with the completion of primary school. In particular, we measure the long-run effects of this reform on PISA achievement test scores based on a difference-in-differences setup. In order to disentangle average from distributional achievement effects, we complementarily rely on a changes-in-changes framework. Our results indicate that preponed school tracking increases test scores in the upper tail of the skill distribution and lowers test scores in the lower tail of the skill distribution, compensating each other on average.11This study does not represent a comprehensive evaluation of the exploited reform in Lower Saxony in 2004. We are grateful for the data provided by the Research Data Center (FDZ) at the Institute for Educational Quality Improvement (IQB) associated with the Humboldt University of Berlin. Marcus Roller acknowledges financial support by the WWZ Förderverein. We are grateful for valuable inputs from Blaise Melly and two anonymous referees. In addition, we thank the participants of the EEA Annual Congress 2017, the SSES Annual Congress 2017, the Spring Meeting of Young Economists 2018 and seminar participants at the Universities of Basel and Tübingen. The views expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of PricewaterhouseCoopers.
Highlights
While most countries teach students comprehensively in primary school, some countries track students into different tiers in secondary school
In coherence with the theoretical predictions, Piopiunik (2014) concludes that further tracking gave rise to lower state Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA)-test scores based on a state-level difference-in-difference research design
We set out a simple model of human capital development involving positive spillover effects from high-skilled to low-skilled students and a penalty that punishes teaching targeted at a distant student in the skill distribution
Summary
While most countries teach students comprehensively in primary school, some countries track students into different tiers in secondary school. In coherence with the theoretical predictions, Piopiunik (2014) concludes that further tracking gave rise to lower state PISA-test scores based on a state-level difference-in-difference research design. In his framework, there might be self-selection in or out of the untreated third track which would bias the results. This study contributes to the empirical literature on early school tracking by providing causal estimates of the effect of early school tracking on the achievements of students in the context of a developed country by using micro data and exploiting a quasi-experimental setting.
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