School tracking, educational mobility and inequality in German secondary education: developments across cohorts

ABSTRACT

Secondary education is associated with a comparatively high level of inequality in Germany. This has often been attributed to the early ability-based between-school tracking in the German school system. However, as yet there has been no empirical evaluation of the actual impact of initial track placement on social inequality in final school attainment. Since educational reforms in the 1960s increased educational mobility after track placement, it can be expected that initial track allocation has become less important for the process of secondary educational attainment and the inequalities therein. By drawing on longitudinal life-course data for different birth cohorts from the 1930s to the 1980s, this paper analyses temporal developments in the connections between track placement, educational mobility and social inequality in final school outcomes. The analyses reveal that the impact of track placement actually diminished for those cohorts exposed to the reformed school system. Instead, social inequalities in school attainment are increasingly influenced by processes of educational mobility after track allocation. Furthermore, the analyses show that developments in educational mobility have contributed more to declining inequalities in access to upper secondary education than changes of the selectivities in the transition to secondary education.

KEYWORDS:

• Education
• school tracking
• social inequality
• Germany
• educational attainment
• educational transitions

Acknowledgements

I thank Martin Neugebauer and Markus Lörz for their comments on an earlier draft of this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Steffen Schindler is Professor of Sociology with Focus on Education and Work in the Life-Course at the University of Bamberg. His research interests include educational inequalities, social stratification, life-course analysis, and the connection between education and the labour market.

Notes

1 The term ‘educational mobility’ refers to intra-generational mobility, i.e. when the final level of educational attainment is different from the level that would have corresponded to the initial secondary school track.

2 Except for Berlin and Brandenburg, where it comprises 6 years.

3 In Eastern German states the secondary education system traditionally comprises two tracks: one academic and one non-academic track. Only recently have some Western German states started to adopt this model.

4 In contrast, downward educational mobility is not assumed to be socially selective.

5 This process should also lead to the emergence of a new qualitative dimension of inequality within upper secondary education: direct and academic pathways to upper secondary qualification vs. indirect and vocationally oriented pathways to (restricted) upper secondary qualifications.

6 Checks with the National Educational Panel Study (NEPS) do not indicate that this causes a serious bias.

7 Some vocational upper secondary schools have evolved out of precursor institutions that existed even before the 1970s, e.g. schools for engineers etc., which also awarded upper secondary qualifications. But many of the vocational schools have been founded as new institutions.

8 The analyses were conducted with the Stata ado ‘khb’ by Ulrich Kohler and Kristian Karlson.