Inequality in Pandemic Effects on School Track Placement and the Role of Social and Academic Embeddedness
Van de Werfhorst, Herman G., Dieuwke Zwier, Sara Geven, Thijs Bol, and Carla Haelermans
A lot of research has been done on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on learning outcomes (for a meta-analysis see 1). However, most studies look at test scores on standardized tests. From a sociological perspective, educational attainment, that unfolds across important transitions in the school career, may be more relevant than achievement test scores. Simply put, the educational qualification that one reaches may be more relevant for further life chances than the achievement tests on mathematics or literacy. Hence, we wanted to study the impact of the pandemic on an important educational transition: from primary to secondary school. This transition seems to be particularly relevant in a system where the transition implies the choice for different tracks early in the school career, such as in the Netherlands. Therefore, we asked the question how the pandemic has affected the transition into the Dutch tracked educational system, with pre-vocational, intermediate, and academic tracks. We were particularly interested in socioeconomic inequalities in the pandemic effects on track enrolment, as early tracking is a known contributor to inequalities in the educational system2,3.
Moreover, we coincidentally fielded a survey and collected sociometric data among students in the final year of primary school (sixth grade), right before the pandemic hit the Netherlands (January/February 2020). In that so-called PRIMS survey we asked about student traits such as academic motivation, self-efficacy, and grit 4. Furthermore, we registered whose parents regularly talked with each other, which allowed us to measure each child’s parents’ centrality in the class network. We also registered whether parents and children talk about school a lot. Together, these measures indicated academic and social embeddedness of students. We could merge the PRIMS survey with the register data of all students in the Dutch schooling system, made available through the National Cohort Study of Education (NCO in Dutch)5. This way, we could correlate the estimated individual pandemic effect with student embeddedness.
We examined the impact of the pandemic by comparing the ‘pandemic cohort’ with the pre-pandemic cohort. More specifically, we compared the student cohort that went through the transition from primary to secondary school in the first pandemic year (in the summer of 2020) with the cohort that went through the transition in the previous year. For each student in the pandemic cohort we created a counterfactual student based on the previous cohort, with the same socioeconomic background, gender, earlier test scores, and school-level performance. We examined three different outcomes: the track recommendation given by the primary school teacher, the track that students enrolled in the first year of secondary school, and the track students enrolled in the third year. The results indicated that the pandemic has had a much smaller impact on the track enrolments than it has had on student test scores elsewhere reported. Nevertheless, the negative effects were strongest among the most disadvantaged students in terms of parental education and income. (see figure 1).
Figure 1: The size of the estimated pandemic effect on three tracking outcomes
On the one hand one could say that smaller effects are good. Students had to be placed in an existing tracking structure, and the Dutch government aimed to minimize the damage to the structure by encouraging schools to provide “generous recommendations”, which may have worked. On the other hand, even small effects can have serious consequences. Small but real effects on track enrolment can have large effects on the life course, as school track affects enrolment in university education and labour market opportunities later on.
Linking the estimated pandemic effects to the student survey, it appeared that the effect was weakest among students with high levels of motivation and self-efficacy. See Figure 2, that models the outcome controlling for the counterfactual outcome, with embeddedness variables as predictors. Parental networks were not correlated with the size of the pandemic effect, unexpectedly. Possibly this null finding adds to the more critical evaluation of the relevance of ‘social capital’ in recent scholarship on education 6,7.
Figure 2: Relationship between academic and social embeddedness and the size of the pandemic effect
References
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