How Tracking and School Composition Shape Students' Pathways Into Adulthood: A Swiss Perspective

• In Event: Equity and School Improvement

Abstract

Many countries apply tracking in secondary education resulting in educational inequalities which can be explained by different institutionalized learning opportunities as well as by differences in schools’ student composition. This paper focused on Switzerland where tracking takes place when students are 12 years old. We examined whether and to what extent tracking and school composition shape students’ transition from lower-secondary to upper-secondary education. Based on data from the PISA follow-up study TREE (n=4,192 students from 197 schools), multilevel analyses showed that students from more privileged schools were twice as likely to manage this transition. Compositional and tracking effects were strongly confounded. Beyond this, differential transition probabilities depending on the schools’ social composition were observed even within higher tracks.

Authors

• Katja Scharenberg, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München

• Wolfram Rollett, University of Education Freiburg