Dreams and realities of school tracking and vocational education

Abstract

School tracking has been introduced as a means to provide skills the labor market demands, and as such has been in place for several decades in most Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries. The time is thus ripe for a critical review of the effects this has had on the equalities in education and opportunities later in life, and on the quality of vocational education in general. A synthesis of the existing literature reveals gaping holes between the dreams of superior vocational education and training that educational tracking ought to deliver, and the realities of lost opportunities and facilitated inequalities, especially in students with poor socioeconomic background, weak social capital, and sparse social networks. This is all the more true the sooner educational tracking comes into effect. While most OECD countries will start tracking students aged 15 or 16, some countries, such as Germany, will start doing this as early as age 10. Our review shows that this can have catastrophic consequences for students that for various reasons perform poorly early on, as they are indeed unable to recover due to the Matthew effect and preferential attachment in social networks, both of which punish false starts in life and reward first movers. To remedy the situation, we propose educational tracking be held off until later in life, and even then be undertaken with flexibility and late bloomers in mind. We also propose to restructure vocational education by decreasing the degree of curriculum differentiation, by allowing broader vocational education curricula, and by decreasing the number of training occupations in order to account for the changing labor market dynamics.

The Linkage between Vocational Education and Labor Market in Turkey: Employability and Skill Mismatch

“…This circumstance indicates indirectly that sources of the issue are not identified accurately. When current data is evaluated as a whole, the most important problem about VET is that although VET in Turkey is structured on occupationally-specific skills (Ozer, 2019a;Ozer and Perc, 2020), similar to the German VET model, labor market is not structured with a rewarding mechanism for VET graduates as in Germany. In other words, main source of problems is the structural characteristics of the labor market rather than education.…”

Akademik Başarının Yordayıcıları: Sosyoekonomik Düzey ve Okul Türü

“…Although school tracking enriches the educational systems by separating rooms for different curriculums, for example vocational education in order to meet differentiating skills demands of the labor market, it attracts many more debates about its unintended consequences on the inequality of education and opportunity (Hanushek et al , 2017;Müller & Shavit, 1998;Reichelt, Collischon & Eberl, 2019;Woessmann, 2009). Early tracking especially, makes the reproduction of social classes easier because of the fact that students' academic achievements at early ages are much more dependent on their socioeconomic status (Ozer & Perc, 2020;. The ratio of the number of students in vocational track compared to those in academic track might be considered to be an indicator of social stratification (Bertocchi & Spagat, 2004;Ozer, 2019b).…”

“…The ratio of the number of students in vocational track compared to those in academic track might be considered to be an indicator of social stratification (Bertocchi & Spagat, 2004;Ozer, 2019b). A very recent study by Ozer and Perc (2020) investigated the intended and unintended consequences (dreams and realities) of the school tracking in terms of inequality of education and opportunity, and evaluated its strong negative effects on vocational education. Vocational education has a remarkable disadvantage caused by the clustering of students from low-socioeconomic level and lower academic achievement levels in many countries (Ozer & Suna, 2019;Neuman & Ziderman, 1991) In this context, there is ongoing discussion in many countries about the relationship between students' scores on standardized tests, students' socioeconomic status, and school characteristics (Waters et al, 2009).…”

The Achievement Gap between Schools and Relationship between Achievement and Socioeconomic Status in Turkey

“…The school tracking, which is implemented in the last year of secondary school, is main the reason why these differences have become increasingly visible at the secondary education level (Bölükbaş & Gür, 2020;Özer, 2020a;Özer & Perc, 2020). The tracking of students into school types based on their academic achievement further strengthens the achievement gap between schools.…”