Determined to Succeed?
Performance versus Choice in Educational Attainment
In many countries, concern about socio-economic inequalities in educational attainment has focused on inequalities in test scores and grades. The presumption has been that the best way to reduce inequalities in educational outcomes is to reduce inequalities in performance. But is this presumption correct?
Determined to Succeed? is the first book to offer a comprehensive cross-national examination of the roles of performance and choice in generating inequalities in educational attainment. It combines in-depth studies by country specialists with chapters discussing more general empirical, methodological, and theoretical aspects of educational inequality. The aim is to investigate to what extent inequalities in educational attainment can be attributed to differences in academic performance between socio-economic groups, and to what extent they can be attributed to differences in the choices made by students from these groups. The contributors focus predominantly on inequalities related to parental class and parental education.
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Table of contents
How is inequality of educational opportunity generated? The case for primary and secondary effects
Michelle Jackson
Primary and secondary effects: Some methodological issues
Christiana Kartsonaki, Michelle Jackson and David R. Cox
Inequality in transitions to secondary school and tertiary education in Germany
Martin Neugebauer, David Reimer, Steffen Schindler and Volker Stocké
How social background affects educational attainment over time in the Netherlands (Appendix)
Charlotte Büchner and Rolf van der Velden
Academic achievement, tracking decisions and their relative contribution to educational inequalities: Change over four decades in France (Appendix)
Mathieu Ichou and Louis-André Vallet
Social origin inequalities in educational careers in Italy. Performance or decision effects? (Appendix)
Dalit Contini and Andrea Scagni
Ever declining inequalities? Transitions to upper secondary and tertiary education in Sweden, for the 1972-1990 birth cohorts (Appendix)
Frida Rudolphi
Dentist, driver, or dropout? Family background and secondary education choices in Denmark
Anders Holm and Mads Meier Jæger
Social background and educational transitions in England (Appendix)
Michelle Jackson
Class origins, high school graduation, and college entry in the United States (Appendix)
Stephen L. Morgan, Michael W. Spiller and Jennifer J. Todd
Why does inequality of educational opportunity vary across countries? Primary and secondary effects in comparative context
Michelle Jackson and Jan O. Jonsson
Methods
To evaluate the relative importance of primary and secondary effects, we use a method introduced in Erikson et al., 2005 and applied in Jackson et al., 2007. It is straightforward to apply the method using one of the following packages:
Maarten Buis created a Stata package (ldecomp) that allows for the calculation of primary and secondary effects, with bootstrapped standard errors. This paper explains how to install and use the package, and provides a generalization of the Erikson et al. method.
Christiana Kartsonaki created an R package (DECIDE) that allows for the calculation of primary and secondary effects, alongside analytical standard errors. The derivation of the standard errors (and other quantities) is described in Kartsonaki et al., 2013. Information about the R package can be found here.
More recent papers on primary and secondary effects have used the KHB decomposition to calculate primary and secondary effects. A paper applying the KHB decomposition to the study of primary and secondary effects can be found here. A Stata package (khb) is also available.