Educational tracking an inequality

Educational tracking is not internationally implemented, as its merits and demerits are disputed. This research analyzes the differences between tracked and untracked students regarding a novel measure of education quality, namely the cognitive value gained by the students within one year of school attendance. I employ quantile regression to allow differences caused by tracking to vary in different levels of cognitive ability, and validate the differences between these levels using interquantile regression. The findings show remarkable differences between the top and bottom 10% of students, and suggest that tracking significantly enlarges inequality within students’ performances, in the sense that top students profit from being in a tracked system, whereas bottom students are better off in an untracked system.