Should we sort it out later? The effect of tracking age on long-run outcomes

Abstract

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Who Benefits from Attending the Higher Track? The Effect of Track Assignment on Skill Development and the Role of Relative Age

“…This suggests that, for cognitive achievement, track allocation is efficient such that no marginal students would benefit from switching track. It may be surprising that higher peer quality in T H does not translate into achievement gains, but these findings are in line with other research for the Netherlands that identifies weak or no short-run achievement effects of track assignment or tracking age (Borghans et al, 2019(Borghans et al, , 2020.…”

Delayed tracking and inequality of opportunity: Gene-environment interactions in educational attainment

“…This does not mean our study settles the matter: our design is not perfect either. The most important limitation is that whether children delay tracking is not exogenously controlled, which the non-genetic literature deals better with by using difference-in-difference 69 or instrumental variable approaches 26 . This leaves open the possibility that children that choose to delay tracking are somehow also the ones that would have been better in realizing their genetic potential if they would have been tracked immediately.…”

“…Van Elk et al 25 report for those with a MAVO track recommendation (old label for VMBO-t) that children from higher-SES and more urbanized areas more often attend a heterogeneous class, but that none of the effects are significant in a multivariate analysis. Borghans et al 26 show for those with a HAVO to VWO recommendation that higher-SES and higher-performing children are less likely to attend a heterogeneous class. All in all, the evidence does not point towards strong selectivity, but nevertheless we check whether two potential confounders, namely family SES and school performance of the child, influence the choice to delay tracking or not.…”

Understanding the Response to High-Stakes Incentives in Primary Education

“…Hanushek and Wössmann, 2006;Ruhose and Schwerdt, 2016;Matthewes, 2020). 54 Second, much of the remaining evidence comes from studies looking at the long-run effects of postponing the age of tracking (Meghir and Palme, 2005;Aakvik et al, 2010;Pekkala Kerr et al, 2013;Borghans et al, 2020;Canaan, 2020). Students are still tracked at some point during secondary school in these contexts.…”