Attainment in secondary school

Abstract

This paper studies attainment in secondary schools. We estimate an education production function in which attainment depends upon parental inputs, peer group inputs and schooling inputs. We find that the most powerful parental input is parental interest in children, as assessed by teachers. We find a strong peer group effect. The school pupil-teacher ratio does not enter significantly. The only strongly endogenous variable is initial attainment. We argue that this is due to measurement error. There is some evidence that parental interest is endogenous but we do not find peer group variables to be so.

Family Background or the Characteristics of Children: What Determines High School Success in Germany?

“…Nguyen and Taylor (2003) show that the effects of parental characteristics are also positive, but differ among ethnic groups and selected tracks for pupils' post-high school choices in the USA. Feinstein and Symons (1999) and Ermisch and Francesconi (2001) support these findings with similar evidence for the UK (see Li 2007 for China, Maani and Kalb 2007 for New Zealand). Chen and Kaplan (1999) concentrate on the relationship between family structure and educational attainment of the child.…”

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“…Within the school, the peer effect can be approximated by combining the average grade of the school, the proportion of children in the class coming from non-manual background, the number of suspended students in the school etc. (Feinstein and Symons, 1999). The concept is similar to the school advantage/disadvantage examined above.…”

“…In a meta-analysis of 41 studies, Jeynes (2005) found that PI improved academic performance of urban elementary school pupils by 0.7 to 0.75 of a standard deviation, the effect also being significant for children from disadvantaged backgrounds (either by race, ethnicity, or family income). Feinstein and Symons (1999) found that an increase of PI in child's schooling from 0 to 1 (the highest level) would increase the combined test scores by 24.4 percentage points (measured on a scale of 0-100). 5 They found that PI is the most important variable influencing school outcomes.…”

“…Most studies find that females perform better than males (Casillas et al, 2012;Legewie and DiPrete, 2012;Livaditis et al, 2003;Serbin, Stack and Kingdon, 2013) and usually consider being male a risk factor for low performance. Still, some studies find that boys can also outperform girls, usually in math and science (for instance, Feinstein and Symons, 1999), or that gender is insignificant in explaining the differences in school performance (Sandilands et al, 2014). Most authors agree however that gender and socioeconomic status (SES) are closely related and should be analyzed jointly as the school or class SES has a different influence on the two genders (Legewie and DiPrete, 2012;Sandilands et al, 2014).…”

“…Similarly, Feinstein and Symons (1999) and Li, Allen and Casillas (2017) argue that parental involvement in schooling and parent-child communication about school has a greater effect on girls than boys. Most studies also include students' race and/or ethnicity, finding that minority groups/immigrant children usually underperform (Pong and Hao, 2007;Casillas et al, 2012;Thapa et al, 2013).…”