Is Ability Tracking (Really) Responsible for Educational Inequalities in Achievement? A Comparison between the Country States Bavaria and Hesse in Germany

It is still taken for granted that (early) ability tracking increases the impact of social origin on achievement in (lower) secondary education, but without gains in the overall level. This contribution addresses the question of whether this common conviction is really correct. The various deviations and inconsistencies obtained from analyses that use other approaches and data bases form the starting point. On the basis of a general theoretical model, the Model of Ability Tracking, we specify the preconditions for identifying the effects of ability tracking. These include considering the school level as well as cognitive abilities prior to ability tracking at the end of elementary school. Both conditions aren't included in common analyses using PISA data. As a consequence, effects of social origin have been systematically overestimated and those of cognitive abilities haven't been detected in the respective studies at all. Because PISA data are lacking information on cognitive abilities in the institutional sorting at the end of primary school and no other appropriate data set to compare educational systems is available, these assumptions will be tested with another data base: the BIKS-study. This study allows using the different levels of strictness of the institutional rules concerning ability tracking in the two country states Bavaria and Hesse in Germany. The results support the presumptions of the Model of Ability Tracking: If school effects on the one hand and cognitive abilities on the other hand were taken into account, all effects of a reinforcement of social origin disappear and increases in school effects of abilities on achievement are observed in Bavaria, the country state with an especially strict rule for ability tracking. Applying the misspecifications of the other approaches to these data, one again obtains their misleading findings, and they disappear by approaching the analyses to the specifications of the Model of Ability Tracking

Labor market entries and early careers in the United States of America, 1984-2002: increasing employment instability among young people?

"In this working paper, we analyze the labor market entries and the subsequent early careers of young people in the United States of America. Using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, we study school leavers aged 16 to 35 longitudinally between 1984 and 2002. Our main research questions regard the consequences of increasing flexibility demands for youth across the past decades: we examine whether the initial phase of working life has become more difficult for young US Americans and whether certain social groups face a greater disadvantage to find a foothold on the job market. We study the duration between leaving education and finding first employment as well as of the job quality of the labor market entry position. The quality is assessed, first, by the risk of starting the career in a precarious stopgap job and, second, by the probability of being overqualified for the respective position. We observe early career developments regarding the chances of moving out of such unfavorable stopgap jobs and the upward and downward mobility in the first five years of employment. Our findings suggest that it has become more difficult for school leavers to find first employment in times of increasing flexibility demands; however, the job quality as well as the subsequent career mobility depend more on the general economic conditions that school graduates face when they leave the educational system. Moreover, our results indicate persisting inequality patterns for the US: young women have greater difficulties to enter the labor market and find a well-paid job than young men do. Although less pronounced, notable disadvantages for non-white minorities could also be identified. However, educational attainment plays the most discriminating role of the last decades: while a high school degree has lost much of its value, holding a tertiary degree has become the strongest predictor for early labor market success." (author's abstract

Increasing flexibility at labor market entry and in the early career: a new conceptual framework for the flexCAREER project

"Continuous full-time work is becoming less frequent in modern societies. Instead, flexible forms of employment such as part-time work, fixed-term contracts, and self-employment as well as phases of unemployment are gaining importance. These trends are supposed to be more pronounced at labor market entry, leading to a prolonged entry process and increasing difficulties in becoming established on the labor market. However, there are vast differences between countries with regard to forms of labor market flexibility and the degrees of uncertainty young people have to face. This working paper provides a theoretical framework for the empirical studies within the flexCAREER research program. The aim of flexCAREER is to study the consequences of employment flexibility strategies on labor market entries and early careers as well as their impact on structures of social inequality in a cross-country perspective. We explain the reasons behind the rise in employment flexibility and develop hypotheses with special regard to nation-based institutional differences. In particular, we describe which role institutional settings such as the educational system, production regimes, employment protection legislations, and labor market policies play in determining the consequences of employment flexibility strategies. We focus on the institutional contexts of Great Britain, the USA, Germany (East and West), France, the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, Denmark, Sweden, Estonia, and Hungary, which are the countries under study. The hypotheses in this working paper concern the following aspects: 1. the phase of labor market entry in terms of a) the duration of search for the first job and b) the quality of this first job (with regard to the flexibility of the employment contract and the 'adequacy' of the job with respect to the employee's educational qualification). 2. In view of the early career, we outline our expectations in terms of a) the risk of unemployment, b) the chances of reentering the labor force when unemployed (e.g., with regard to the duration of unemployment until finding a new job), c) upward and downward mobility, d) the chances of leaving precarious work at the beginning of the career, and e) the risk of making a transition into a precarious form of employment." (author's abstract

Flexibility processes and social inequalities at labor market entry and in the early career: a conceptual paper for the flexCAREER project

"Continuous full-time work is becoming less frequent in modern societies. Instead, flexible forms of employment such as part-time work, fixed-term contracts, and self-employment as well as phases of unemployment are gaining importance. These trends are supposed to be more pronounced at labor market entry, leading to a longer entry process and increasing difficulties in becoming established in the labor market. However, there are vast differences between countries with regard to forms of labor market flexibility and the degree of uncertainty faced by young people. This working paper provides a theoretical framework for the empirical studies within the flexCAREER research program. The aim of flexCAREER is to study the consequences of employment flexibility strategies on labor market entries and early careers as well as their impact on structures of social inequality in a cross-country perspective. We explain the reasons behind the rise in employment flexibility and develop hypotheses with special regard to nation-based institutional differences. In particular, we describe what role institutions such as the education system, employment relations, and welfare regimes play in determining the consequences of employment flexibility strategies. We focus on the institutional contexts of Great Britain, the USA, Germany (East and West), the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, Denmark, Sweden, Estonia, and Hungary; these are the countries under study within the project. The hypotheses in this working paper concern the following aspects: 1. the phase of labor market entry in terms of a) the duration of search for the first job and b) the quality of this first job (with regard to the flexibility of the employment contract and the 'adequacy' of the job with respect to the employee's educational qualification). 2. In view of the early career we outline our expectations in terms of a) the risk of unemployment, b) the chances of re-entering the labor force when unemployed (e.g., with regard to the duration of unemployment until finding a new job), c) upward and downward mobility, d) the chances of leaving precarious work at the beginning of the career, and e) the risk of making a transition into a precarious form of employment." (author's abstract

Primäre und sekundäre Effekte am Übertritt in die Sekundarstufe I : zur Rolle von sozialer Herkunft und Migrationshintergrund

Zugl.: Bamberg, Univ., Diss., 2012 u.d.T.: Relikowski, Ilona: Primäre und sekundäre Effekte am Übergang in das gegliederte Schulsyste

Equality of opportunity and achievement in social change. Primary and secondary Effects of social origin at secondary school transition in Hesse 1969 and 2007

The positive impact of families' higher social origin on the transition into more demanding secondary school forms can be split up into two effects: the primary effect, which is conditioned by higher achievements of children from privileged social origin, and the secondary effect, which is independent of achievement differences and can be explained by the fact that higher school curricula are less costly and promise more benefits for parents of higher social status than for parents of lower social status. It is examined how the relative size of both effects has changed in Germany between 1969 and 2007 using two comparable studies in the federal state Hesse, which measure students' achievement and their social origin in very similar ways. The transition to the Gymnasium, the most prestigious track of the German tripartite secondary school, is investigated applying the method by Karlson et al. (2012). The primary effect has increased, specifically because of an increasing impact of achievement; and the secondary effect decreased such that school has gained more impact compared to the child's parental home