Just how flexible is the German selective secondary school system? A configurational analysis

Abstract

School systems may be usefully characterized according to Turner’s proposed ideal types of sponsored and contest mobility. Germany is a critical case with respect to this typology because its secondary school system is stratified and selective, and yet it offers the opportunity for upward and downward mobility. Drawing on an analysis of a German longitudinal dataset, this paper addresses the question of flexibility or rigidity of the school system, exploring the ways in which factors other than pupils’ ability influence selection processes within that system. Both academic ability and ascriptive factors act together to facilitate or hinder changes of academic routes within the school system. The methodological focus of the paper is on the introduction to an innovative method, Charles Ragin’s Qualitative Comparative Analysis, a method based on set theory. It involves the identification of necessary and sufficient conditions for a given outcome, taking conjunctions of causal conditions into account.

Keywords:

• selective school system
• educational mobility
• Germany
• Qualitative Comparative Analysis

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Barry Cooper for his very helpful comments. Thanks also to two anonymous referees for their valuable feedback.

Notes

1. In some sense, this intragenerational mobility is equivalent to educational mobility and intergenerational mobility corresponds to social mobility.

2. LifE: Lebensverläufe ins frühe Erwachsenenalter (pathways from late childhood to early adulthood). Authors: Helmut Fend, Werner Georg, Fred Berger, Urs Grob, Wolfgang Lauterbach. The study has been jointly conducted by the Universities of Constance, Zürich and Münster. See www.uni‐konstanz.de/lebensverlaeufe for an English summary.

3. As well as the method, Ragin has also, together with others, developed the software fs/QCA (for ‘fuzzy set/Qualitative Comparative Analysis’) (Ragin, Drass, and Davey 2006) which performs the required analyses. This is the software used here.

4. Based on Boudon (1974) as discussed in Cooper (2005, 2006).

5. I deliberately avoid the use of the terms ‘cause’ or ‘causal condition’ as the relationships described here are patterns of association. Causal statements can only be made based on theoretical considerations.

6. Note that, in conducting research, temporal order and substantive knowledge need to be used in determining the causal order, i.e. the difference between Figures 1 and 2 lies in what is considered cause and effect. It is conceivable that this may vary or not be clear in a research situation. For our purposes, however, we have decided that A is the cause and O the outcome. The determination of sufficiency and necessity is based on this decision.

7. Another way of thinking about consistency/sufficiency and coverage/necessity is in terms of inflow and outflow: in a cross‐tabulation such as Table 3, the proportion of cause A in O which we called consistency can be called outflow because it refers to the percentage of people with A who subsequently obtain O. The proportion of O with condition A as described in Table 5 (called coverage) can also be called inflow because it refers to the percentage of people with O who got there after having also experienced A.

8. This simplification is possible since in the solution, both the presence and absence of A are given. Therefore, A is irrelevant and can be left out.

9. Going through various levels of consistency instead of choosing a single one brings out the relative importance of conditions which can be very instructive. Cooper (2005, 2006) makes use of this approach.

10. This would be a rather generous threshold, however, and was chosen only in order to demonstrate a solution with several pathways. It is more common to choose a threshold of at least 0.75.

11. I am aware that using parental education as a proxy for social class origin may be considered problematic. However, the data on parental social class in the LifE study are not very good, with many missing data and a coding scheme which is not clear in places. Since the focus of this paper is on educational processes, it seemed legitimate to analyze parents’ education as a potential influence on educational outcomes instead of actual social class.