Do Well-off Families Compensate for Low Cognitive Ability? Evidence on Social Inequality in Early Schooling from a Twin Study

Abstract

This article bridges the literature on educational inequality between and within families to test whether high-socioeconomic status (SES) families compensate for low cognitive ability in the transition to secondary education in Germany. The German educational system of early-ability tracking (at age 10) represents a stringent setting for the compensatory hypothesis. Overall, previous literature offers inconclusive findings. Previous research between families suffers from the misspecification of parental SES and ability, while most within-family research did not stratify the analysis by SES or the ability distribution. To address these issues, I draw from the TwinLife study to implement a twin fixed-effects design that minimizes unobserved confounding. I report two main findings. First, highly educated families do not compensate for twins' differences in cognitive ability at the bottom of the ability distribution. In the German system of early-ability tracking, advantaged families may have more difficulties to compensate than in countries where educational transitions are less dependent on ability. Second, holding parents' and children's cognitive ability constant, pupils from highly educated families are 27% more likely to attend the academic track. This result implies wastage of academic potential for disadvantaged families, challenging the role of cognitive ability as the leading criterion of merit for liberal theories of equal opportunity. These findings point to the importance of other factors that vary between families with different resources and explain educational success, such as noncognitive abilities, risk aversion to downward mobility, and teachers' bias.

Políticas educativas preventivas de la repetición de curso en la enseñanza obligatoria en España

“…Cabrera et al (2019) encontraron que el abandono escolar al acabar en España los estudios obligatorios de secundaria se relaciona estrechamente con las propias expectativas que el alumnado señala durante su etapa en secundaria obligatoria (2º curso) y que éstas se asocian fuertemente con la repetición de curso generando, al tiempo, un problema de desafección escolar. La repetición escolar genera la mayor inequidad del sistema educativo, al concentrar sobre ella una gran representación de alumnado procedente de entornos sociales desfavorecidos (Cortázar, 2019;Gil-Hernández, 2019) y de regiones donde tales entornos tienen mayor prevalencia (Pérez, Serrano, & Uriel, 2019;Murillo & Martínez-Garrido, 2018). Siguiendo los objetivos de la UNESCO (1977;2011b) encaminados hacia políticas educativas inclusivas centradas en la lucha contra la desigualdad y la pobreza, la democratización de la enseñanza y la educación para todos, hemos encontrado en este artículo acciones de política educativa, también familiar, que favorecen la inclusión educativa a través de la lectura desde tempranas edades, propiciando el hábito lector en las escuelas [y en y con las familias (Díez & Flecha, 2010)] y el apoyo educativo a los nacidos en el segundo semestre del año natural, especialmente noviembre, donde se concentra la mayor proporción de repetición del año escolar (y los peores resultados en pruebas externas).…”

Trait-specific testing of the equal environment assumption: The case of school grades and upper secondary school attendance

“…Twin-based research designs are relatively new to sociology, and a growing number of sociologists use these designs to differentiate between genetic and social causes of social inequalities (e.g. Nielsen 2016;Grätz & Torche 2016;Jaeger & Møllegaard 2017;Schulz et al 2017;Gil-Hernández 2019;. Demographers have used twin-based research designs for longer to differentiate between genetic and social causes of demographic outcomes, such as fertility (e.g.…”

Is there something special about twin families? A comparison of parenting styles in twin and non-twin families

“…Most importantly, in the past few years twin-based research designs have increasingly been used in sociology as a powerful quasi-experimental design to come closer to causal conclusions in the investigation of unequal life chances (e.g. Nielsen, 2016;Grätz and Torche, 2016;Jaeger and Møllegaard, 2017;Schulz et al, 2017;Gil-Hernández, 2019). Traditional sibling analyses can suffer from unobserved heterogeneity (e.g.…”