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The Long-Run Educational Benefits of High-Achieving Classrooms

Despite the prevalence of school tracking, evidence on whether it improves student success is mixed. This paper studies how tracking within high school impacts high-achieving students’ short- and longer-term academic outcomes. Our setting is a large and selective Chinese high school, where first-year students are separated into high-achieving and regular classrooms based on their performance on a standardized exam. Classrooms differ in terms of peer ability, teacher quality, class size, as well as level and pace of instruction. Using newly collected administrative data and a regression discontinuity design, we show that high-achieving classrooms improve math test scores by 23 percent of a standard deviation, with effects persisting throughout the three years of high school. Effects on performance in Chinese and English language subjects are more muted. Importantly, we find that high-achieving classrooms substantially raise enrollment in elite universities, as they increase scores on the national college entrance exam—the sole determinant of university admission in China.

Keywords
Classroom Tracking; Peer Quality; Teacher Quality; Regression Discontinuity; China
Education level
Document Object Identifier (DOI)
10.26300/9k2n-2y17

EdWorkingPaper suggested citation:

Canaan, Serena, Pierre Mouganie, and Peng Zhang. (). The Long-Run Educational Benefits of High-Achieving Classrooms. (EdWorkingPaper: 22-519). Retrieved from Annenberg Institute at Brown University: https://doi.org/10.26300/9k2n-2y17

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