The Hidden Hierarchy of Alphabetic Class Labels

• In Event: Identifying Peer Effects: Evidence from Classrooms, Friendships, and Families

Abstract

Introduction/Background

While decades of research have examined formal ability tracking, the widespread practice of alphanumeric class labeling—used with billions of secondary students worldwide—remains understudied. Fixed-cohort education systems, prevalent across post-Soviet countries, China, Japan, Turkey, and Eastern Europe, assign students to stable, alphabetically or numerically labeled classroom groups that persist throughout secondary schooling. Unlike explicit tracking, these assignments are typically framed as administratively neutral. Yet sequential labels create an implicit hierarchy legible to teachers, parents, and students alike, potentially generating stratification through differential expectations, peer dynamics, and parental sorting.

Purpose/Research Question

We examine alphabetically labeled class assignment in Kazakhstan, a fixed-cohort system where ability-based sorting is explicitly prohibited by legislation. 
We address the following research question: What is the relationship between alphabetic administrative class assignment and students’ post-secondary educational outcomes? 

Methods

We analyze administrative data from Kazakhstan’s Ministry of Education covering all high school graduates from 2021 to 2023. The data include student and school characteristics, national university admission examination scores, and post-secondary outcomes. Our key explanatory variable is an alphabetic class label index (0 = first class in sequence, 1 = last), standardized within each school-year cohort. We estimate school-by-year fixed effects models comparing students within the same school and graduation year, controlling for gender, socioeconomic status, language of instruction, high achievement status, peer composition, and class size, with robustness checks using 9th-grade assignments to rule out post-attrition re-sorting bias.

Results

We find systematic, statistically significant negative gradients across the alphabetic sequence. Moving from the first to the last alphabetically ordered class is associated with a 3.8% decrease in standardized test scores, a 3.3 percentage point lower probability of university enrollment, and a 2.8 percentage point lower likelihood of receiving a government scholarship. These effect sizes are comparable to tracking effects documented in the literature in contexts like the U.S. and Europe. Estimates focusing on 9th-grade class assignments are similar, ruling out explanations based on post-compulsory re-sorting. Coefficients are consistent across both urban and rural schools. A mechanism decomposition reveals that 71% of the variation in outcomes operates through unobserved channels consistent with teacher expectations and peer dynamics, after accounting for socioeconomic status (2%), language sorting (18%), and prior achievement (10%).

Conclusion/Implications

This study demonstrates that ostensibly neutral administrative practices generate substantial educational stratification even when formal ability grouping is prohibited by law. Alphabetic class labels function as de facto tracking mechanisms through accumulated differences in institutional treatment, teacher expectations, and peer influences. Our findings challenge the assumption that prohibiting ability testing at school entry is sufficient to ensure equity in fixed-cohort systems. The policy implications are broad: any sequential labeling system that renders class hierarchy legible to teachers, parents, and students risks replicating the inequities associated with formal tracking. Policymakers should consider neutral, non-hierarchical naming conventions, periodic rotation of class compositions, or randomized assignment of students and teachers to classes. These lessons carry cross-national relevance for contexts where within-school organizational practices may perpetuate stratification below the visibility of formal policy debates.

Author

• Aizat Nurshatayeva, Brown University
  Presenting Author