No Evidence that Strict Educational Tracking Improves Student Performance through Classroom Homogeneity: A Critical Reanalysis of Esser and Seuring (2020)

In a recent contribution to this journal, Esser and Seuring (2020) draw on data from the National Educational Panel Study to attack the widespread view that tracking in lower secondary education exacerbates inequalities in student outcomes without improving average student performance. Exploiting variation in the strictness of tracking across 13 of the 16 German federal states (e. g., whether teacher recommendations are binding), Esser and Seuring claim to demonstrate that stricter tracking after grade 4 results in better performance in grade 7 and that this can be attributed to the greater homogeneity of classrooms under strict tracking. We show these conclusions to be untenable: Esser and Seuring’s measures of classroom composition are highly dubious because the number of observed students is very small for many classrooms. Even when we adopt their classroom composition measures, simple corrections and extensions of their analysis reveal that there is no meaningful evidence for a positive relationship between classroom homogeneity and student achievement – the channel supposed to mediate the alleged positive effect of strict tracking. We go on to show that students from more strictly tracking states perform better already at the start of tracking (grade 5), which casts further doubt on the alleged positive effect of strict tracking on learning progress and leaves selection or anticipation effects as more plausible explanations. On a conceptual level, we emphasize that Esser and Seuring’s analysis is limited to states that implement different forms of early tracking and cannot inform us about the relative performance of comprehensive and tracked systems that is the focus of most prior research.