How objective are school advices?

Standardized tests might provide teachers with a benchmark for giving school advices for students in primary education. This paper examined whether parents exert more influence on the school advice of teachers in primary education when schools do not participate in a standardized test. The possible parental pressure on the teacher has been measured by the variable ‘education of parents’. It could be that parents want to influence the teacher to get a higher advice for their child. In order to measure this, data from the COOL5-18 program in the Netherlands from the period 2008-2014 has been used. No clear effect of education of parents on the school advice has been found. Moreover, it became clear that, after three years, pupils from schools that do not use the Citotest do not have a lower level of education than the school initially advised.