How Do High-Stakes Educational Transitions Affect Socioeconomic Achievement Gaps? An International Comparison

• In Event: Excellence in Education Research: Early-Career Scholars and Their Work

Abstract

The strong relationship between family socioeconomic status (SES) and children’s academic achievement is a central concern in education policy research, as academic skills are important determinants of later educational opportunities and life chances. International assessments such as the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) show that this relationship, the “SES achievement gap,” varies widely across countries. (OECD 2013). A consistent finding in comparative education research is that the size of countries’ SES achievement gaps is strongly associated with their form of secondary school curricular differentiation or “tracking”: Many of those countries with particularly large SES achievement gaps track students very early into separate academic and vocational schools (Van de Werfhorst and Mijs 2010).

However, should we assume that SES achievement gaps at age 15 (PISA participants’ age) are a reliable indicator of the level of educational equity and social mobility of a country’s future adult population? There are many reasons we might expect SES achievement gaps to change after age 15. Many Nordic countries begin academic and vocational tracking at age 16, and the US students transition at age 18 from high school into a highly stratified system of higher education and other postsecondary pathways. In this project, I examine whether the effects of these slightly later high-stakes educational have similar effects on SES achievement gaps, and thus whether international assessments such as PISA and TIMSS tell an incomplete story.

Theoretical framework
Selection into academic and vocational secondary schools in countries such as Germany and the Netherlands is considered even more consequential than tracking of courses within US high schools, as the effects of between-school tracking are not only instructional and social, but also institutional (Buchmann and Park 2009; Chmielewski 2014; Lucas 1999; Maaz et al. 2008). That is, academic and vocational tracks in these countries set students on rigid pathways that are difficult to reverse and are tightly linked to destinations in higher education or the labor market. Thus, in each country, I consider the most comparable “high-stakes transition”; for example, the high school–postsecondary transition in the US (age 18).

If this transition has an equivalent effect on the SES achievement gap regardless of the age when it occurs, we would expect the increase in the gap between secondary and postsecondary education in late-tracking countries to be similar in size to the increase in the gap between primary and secondary school in early-tracking countries. On the other hand, sociology research in the “life course perspective” observes that the effects of parental SES on students’ likelihood of making an educational transition tend to decline with age, as students become less economically and socially dependent on their parents (Lucas 2001; Mare 1980; Shavit and Blossfeld 1993). Thus, we may expect the effect of a transition on the SES achievement gap to be smaller when the transition occurs at a later age because relatively more low-SES students successfully transition to the high-status track or destination—even if the instructional, social, and institutional effects of the destinations are equivalent regardless of age.

Author

• Anna K. Chmielewski, OISE/University of Toronto