Socio-Economic Effects of Secondary School Tracking: Binding Teacher Recommendations vs. Free Parental Choice

• Applicant: Dr. Gregor Pfeifer
• Subject Area: Education Systems and Educational Institutions ; Empirical Social Research ; Statistics and Econometrics
• Term: from 2017 to 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 336146422

This project aims to analyzing the influence of the assignment rule that determines the secondary school track in Germany, which the child is allowed to, or must attend. More precisely, differences between binding teacher recommendations and free parental choice are to be evaluated w.r.t. educational outcomes. These outcomes are supposed to provide information on how to allocate pupils most efficiently and, at the same time, decrease social inequality.For this purpose, it is first examined whether a change in the institutional setting leads to a causal and significant shift in transition rates, e.g., towards higher school forms if binding teacher recommendations are abolished. Secondly, it is asked whether these children perform successfully at the beginning of secondary school. For this purpose, the project elaborates on the causal effect on repetition rates for pupils in 5th grade. Lastly, such outcomes are to be analyzed separately for pupils with and without migration background. To identify the causal effects of interest, recent policy reforms are to be exploited that led to the abolition of mandatory teacher recommendations, using non-reformed states as the control group. Particularly, Synthetic Control Methods (SCM) will be conducted (see Abadie et al. 2010): a data-driven algorithm is used to construct a synthetic counterfactual as an optimally weighted average of several potential control units. In this project, however, a dis-aggregated (from state to district level) version of the SCM approach is developed and applied, which is supposed to increase precision in estimation and inference by creating effect distributions.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants