Socio-Economic Effects of Secondary School Tracking: Binding Teacher Recommendations vs. Free Parental Choice

该项目旨在分析决定德国中学入学轨道的分配规则的影响，该规则决定了孩子被允许或必须进入的中学轨道。更准确地说，有约束力的教师推荐和家长自由选择之间的差异将被评估W.r.t。教育成果。这些结果应该提供关于如何最有效地分配学生的信息，同时减少社会不平等。为此，首先审查机构设置的变化是否导致转化率的因果和重大转变，例如，如果有约束力的教师推荐被废除，则转向高中形式。其次，人们问这些孩子在中学开始时是否表现成功。为此，该项目详细阐述了对五年级学生复读率的因果影响。最后，对于有移民背景和没有移民背景的学生，这些结果将分别进行分析。为了确定利益的因果影响，将利用最近的政策改革，这些改革导致废除强制性教师推荐，并以未改革的州为对照组。特别是，将实施综合控制方法(SCM)(见Abadie等人)。2010)：使用数据驱动算法来构建合成反事实，作为几个潜在控制单元的最佳加权平均。然而，在这个项目中，开发并应用了SCM方法的分解版本(从州到地区级别)，该方法被认为通过创建影响分布来提高估计和推理的精度。

This project aims to analyzing the influence of the assignment rule that determines the secondary school track in Germany, which the child is allowed to, or must attend. More precisely, differences between binding teacher recommendations and free parental choice are to be evaluated w.r.t. educational outcomes. These outcomes are supposed to provide information on how to allocate pupils most efficiently and, at the same time, decrease social inequality.For this purpose, it is first examined whether a change in the institutional setting leads to a causal and significant shift in transition rates, e.g., towards higher school forms if binding teacher recommendations are abolished. Secondly, it is asked whether these children perform successfully at the beginning of secondary school. For this purpose, the project elaborates on the causal effect on repetition rates for pupils in 5th grade. Lastly, such outcomes are to be analyzed separately for pupils with and without migration background. To identify the causal effects of interest, recent policy reforms are to be exploited that led to the abolition of mandatory teacher recommendations, using non-reformed states as the control group. Particularly, Synthetic Control Methods (SCM) will be conducted (see Abadie et al. 2010): a data-driven algorithm is used to construct a synthetic counterfactual as an optimally weighted average of several potential control units. In this project, however, a dis-aggregated (from state to district level) version of the SCM approach is developed and applied, which is supposed to increase precision in estimation and inference by creating effect distributions.