Tracking, School Mobility, and Educational Inequality (original) (raw)

Voprosy obrazovaniya / Educational Studies Moscow

School tracking is defined as the placement of students into different school types, structured hierarchically 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