School Track and Inequality in Japanese Upper Secondary Schools

An Analysis Using PISA Data

Abstract

　This paper aims to clarify the relationship between social background and school track in Japanese upper secondary schools. In Japan, the decision on which high school to enter is crucial, because it limits the opportunities for future status attainment. Past literature has clarified the strong relationship between socio-economic status (SES) and the tracking structure of upper secondary schools. However, those studies have suffered from severe limitations: data not randomly sampled; a small number of schools; and student grades so diverse that they could not distinguish through-put effect.　In this paper, we analyze the relationship between SES and the tracking structure using the data called Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2003, a study conducted by OECD every 3 years since 2000, which randomly samples 15 year old students in Japan by both school level and student level. This random-sample data structure justifies the use of hierarchical linear modeling to examine the effect of student background variables and school level variables independently.　The main findings can be summarized as follows: 1) The SES effect on scholastic achievement was strong, but it was due to the large inter-school difference. 2) Educational expectation was determined by school rank and school type independently at the school level, and a positive SES effect existed as an intra-school effect controlling scholastic achievement. 3) Effects have been found of cross-level interaction between school track and SES on educational expectation. This means that the high-SES students can retain their educational expectation even if they have been relegated to an inferior school track.