The Contours of Within-School Tracking in Highly Differentiated Educational Systems: The Chilean Case

• In Event: Sheraton Roundtable Session 20
  In Roundtable Session: Education Policy in Chile

Abstract

This paper articulates and develops empirical measures of multiple organizational dimensions of curriculum tracking drawn from the work of Sorensen (1970) using the case of Chilean “polivalente” schools. The principal assumption is that tracking at school-level is not a unidimensional construct since tracking structures and assignment procedures between academic and vocational programs vary across schools. Also, we hypothesize that tracking patterns are not randomly distribute among “polivalente” schools, instead they are closely linked to the institutional features of those schools as well as to the socioeconomic composition of their student population. Ours results provided evidence that confirmed both hypothesis.

Authors

• María Paola Sevilla, Universidad Alberto Hurtado

• Ernesto Treviño, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile