The contours of within-school tracking in highly differentiated educational systems: The Chilean case

• In Event: Roundtable Session (Wednesday I)
  In Refereed Round-Table Session: Inequities within and between schooling contexts

Proposal

Most educational systems offer alternative qualifications at the secondary level according to their students’ interests and abilities. The historical distinction has been between academic and vocational education. However, other forms of tracking such as offering courses at varying levels of difficulty in one or more subjects within schools also exists. Tracking is a widely discussed topic in educational research. The main question is if the practice is efficient, and if it benefits all students equally. But, the impact of tracking varies throughout schools, mainly because the sorting process is not uniform. Therefore, understanding how schools implement tracking is another relevant question that some researchers have attempted to answer.
Sorensen (1970) identified four organizational dimensions of tracking (inclusiveness, selectivity, electivity and scope) which define the contours of within-school tracking system and have important implications for understanding the role of tracking in the stratification process. Since its conceptualization, Sorensen model has been widely used by scholars whose attention in tracking has focused on the school as an organization rather than students as individuals. However, works that articulate various dimensions of tracking have been developed for American educational systems only, where tracking is structured flexible since overarching tracking schemes were dismantled. The neglect in international research of school tracking patterns in highly differentiated educational systems is challenging since schools integrating both academic and vocational tracks are common in Latin American and are present in European countries such as Belgium and Germany.
Building upon Sorensen’s theoretical work, this paper develops empirical measures of schools tracking patterns using the case of Chilean “polivalente” schools. In Chile, about 40 percent of students enroll in vocational education. There is a very rigid and high scope tracking scheme, in which “polivalente” schools that offer both academic and vocational tracks, allow us to examine tracking patterns at school level, and to explore the association between Sorensen’s organizational dimensions and student track positions. Our main assumption is that tracking is not a unidimensional construct because tracking structures and assignment procedures between tracks vary across schools closely linked to school’s institutional features and social composition. In addition, we hypothesize that students with similar individual characteristics may find themselves in different tracks, depending on the schools tracking patterns they attend.
Taking advantage of the availability of rich administrative data from Chilean secondary schools, as well as data from an ad hoc survey run on a non-random stratified sample of 112 “polivalente” schools, we confirmed that tracking is a multidimensional construct. Also, we found that students with similar individual characteristics are more likely to be found in academic track in “polivalente” schools with high inclusiveness and where selectivity assignment practices operate. Also, when we consider only those students with no expectation of accessing university, school staff influences track choices dimension significantly increase their probabilities to be placed in academic track. Therefore, the role of tracking in the stratification process can be managed to some degree by school authorities and staff inside “polivalentes” schools.

Authors

• Maria Paola Sevilla, Universidad Alberto Hurtado

• Ernesto Treviño, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile