Tracked and Segregated: The Effect of Early Informal Within-School Tracking in Schools with Students with Low Socioeconomic Status or Roma Ethnicity

Abstract

Tracked and Segregated: The Effect of Early Informal Within-School Tracking in Schools with Students with Low Socioeconomic Status or Roma Ethnicity. While between-school tracking has been a well-explored topic especially with countries tracking their educational systems as early as at the age of 10, within-school ability grouping has received comparatively less analytical attention. This paper explores effects of within-school informal tracking practices at socioeconomically and ethnically mixed elementary schools. In Slovakia, where these practices were previously described as linked to segregation of Roma students, they result in academically, socioeconomically, and ethnically distinct separate classes in a school. We try to identify the early tracking practices of schools by exploring if two or more classes included in the TIMSS 2019 assessment in a particular school display extreme differences with regard to ethnic (Slovak vs. Roma) or socioeconomic (defined by parental education levels or occupation) composition. We employ a series of hierarchical linear models to assess the impact of early within-school informal tracking on mathematics and science test results of students from low-track classes. We check the robustness of our findings in a parallel propensity scores approach. Our results confirm that class-level segregation seems to have a very significant connection to academic performance of students from low-track classes. When compared to identical students from non-tracked classes, students from low-track classes have more than 15% lower test scores in mathematics and science. This points to the need to further explore early informal within-school tracking practices which have so far escaped analytical attention. While not a topic of cross-national assessment programs per se, this can be done using data from major international assessments.