?
Трекинг, школьная мобильность и образовательное неравенство
School tracking is defined as the placement of students into different school
types, hierarchically structured by performance. In the majority of OECD countries,
tracking takes place at the age of 15 or 16. In Russia, similarly, students
are sorted into “academic” (high school) and “non-academic” (vocational training)
tracks after Grade 9, at the age of 15. However, even before that split,
Russian children are distributed among schools of differing types (“regular”
schools, specialized schools, gymnasiums and lyceums), which some researchers
refer to as “pre-tracking” [Kosyakova et al. 2016]. No empirical evidence
as to how often students change school prior to formal tracking at age 15 has
been available so far. Using the St. Petersburg administrative school database
containing information on all school transitions made in the 2014/15 academic
year, this article investigates school mobility among first- to eleventh-graders.
In particular, it compares the frequency of changing school across different
grades as well as the overall incidence of school transitions. Regression models
were constructed for academic/non-academic track choice after Grade
9, which link the share of students transitioning to vocational training institutions
with school characteristics. In regard of changing school prior to formal
tracking, findings reveal rather low school mobility. Indeed, in spite of having
vast school change opportunities in a school system of a Russian megalopolis,
65% students attend the same school from Grade 1 through Grade 9, and
85% stick to one school between Grades 5 and 9. This is consistent with Yulia
Kosyakova and her co-authors’ inferences on pre-tracking in the Russian secondary
school. The implications for building individual educational trajectories
and dealing with educational inequality are discussed.