The influence of school tracking systems on educational expectations: a comparative study of Austria and Italy

Abstract

School tracking is usually criticised as a mechanism for social and cultural reproduction. Evidence from the literature shows a significant effect of early tracking on social inequality. Some studies also show that early tracking has a negative effect on the probability of completing higher education. This study uses PISA 2009 data and the propensity score matching technique to compare the effect of academic and vocational tracks on students' educational expectations and whether the effect varies across different socio-economic status in Austria, a country with an early tracking system, and Italy, a country with a later tracking system. The results show that students in Italy have significantly higher educational expectations for academic tertiary degrees than students in Austria. However, the findings do not show any evidence that the effect of tracking on expectations varies by students' socio-economic status in either country. The findings suggest that a later tracking system is associated with higher probabilities of having academic educational expectations; however, this finding should be interpreted with caution as the higher education and vocational education systems are different between the two countries, as well as the valuation of tertiary degrees in the labour market.

Notes on contributor

Bommi Lee is a doctoral student at the Department of Leadership, Policy and Organizations at the Peabody College, Vanderbilt University, located in Nashville, Tennessee, USA. She is specialising her studies in international educational policy and management.

Notes

1. Recent reforms in Austria have initiated merging these two types of schools into comprehensive schools (Neue Mittelschulen) (Hoeckel 2010).

2. I discuss more about this in the discussion section.

3. Research notes the difference between expectations (what a student expects to achieve) and aspirations (what a student hopes to achieve) (Kerckhoff 1976; Hanson 1994). My original intention of this paper was to observe students' aspirations, but because of the wording in the PISA questionnaire, I use and discuss educational expectations. In the theoretical framework part of this paper, I use aspirations and expectations interchangeably, as Hossler and Gallager's (1987) three-stage choice model incorporates educational aspirations and expectations into a single term, ‘predisposition’.