Early tracking and socioeconomic inequality in academic achievement: Studying reforms in nine countries

Abstract

Between-school tracking is high on the agenda of academicresearchers and policy makers, as tracking children early in the school career is believed to enhance socioeconomic inequalities in learning opportunities. Contemporary debates on the relevance of inclusive education in the United States, the Netherlands, Belgium, England and Germany, may learn from changes in educational inequalities that have emerged after past reforms from early tracking to comprehensive systems. I study educational inequalities by socioeconomic background in nine countries, across time. Using a difference-in-difference design and international student assessment data collected among eighth-graders, it is demonstrated that socioeconomic inequalities are more strongly reduced in systems that have transformed their educational system from tracked to comprehensive education than in systems without this reform. Moreover, the reduction of social inequalities was most eminent at the top of the achievement distribution. Among top-performers, socioeconomic inequality was reduced after the reform. Among low-performing students, the reform did little to the level of inequality by social background. Robustness checks showed that especially the reform in England and Wales was influential on the observed reduction of inequalities in mathematics performance.