Schooling as a lottery: Racial differences in school advancement in urban South Africa
Introduction
Grade repetition is one of the most important problems in educational systems in many developing countries. In sub-Saharan Africa, where the problem is particularly severe, repetition rates are often 20% per grade (Lee et al., 2005), contributing both to low average levels of schooling and high schooling inequality. In spite of the wide recognition of the importance of grade repetition, research on the determinants of progress through school remains very limited. The goal of this paper is to advance our understanding of grade repetition by analyzing progress through secondary school in South Africa. More than a decade after the end of apartheid there continue to be large racial differences in schooling outcomes in South Africa. As we will show, grade repetition plays a key role in explaining these differences.
South Africa has almost universal primary school enrollment, with enrollment rates remaining high into the teenage years (Anderson et al., 2001). Ultimate schooling attainment is mostly determined between ages 14 and 22, the years when young people may drop out or fail out of secondary school, may pass or fail their grade 12 matriculation exam, and may or may not go on to post-secondary education. We use the Cape Area Panel Study (CAPS), a longitudinal survey of youth in Cape Town, to follow students through three years of secondary school. We find large racial differences in grade advancement − 82% of white students who were in grades 8 and 9 in 2002 successfully advanced three grades by 2005, compared to 34% of coloured students and only 27% of African students. While dropping out is one reason for these differences, we show that high rates of grade repetition play a fundamental role. While only 27% of African students in grades 8 and 9 in 2002 had advanced three grades by 2005, 67% were still enrolled in school.
The importance of grade repetition has been pointed out in a number of developing countries. Gomes-Neto and Hanushek (1994) documented repetition rates of 20–54% per grade in primary school in Brazil. They found that lower test scores were associated with increased probability of grade repetition, a result consistent with our results. Jacoby (1994) found that 21% of 7–12 year-olds had repeated at least one grade in Peru. He found that household income and assets reduce grade repetition, concluding that borrowing constraints play an important role. As pointed out by Lee et al. (2005), grade repetition is an even more serious problem in sub-Saharan Africa, with repetition rates of over 20% per grade in many countries. Although the importance of these high rates of grade repetition is widely recognized, research on grade repetition is limited. This is due in part to data limitations, with few data sets providing direct information on grade repetition. The CAPS data were collected with a strong focus on grade repetition, allowing us to get a clearer picture of this important component of schooling inequality in South Africa.
As a framework for understanding progress through school we develop a stochastic model of grade advancement. Performance in school in a given year depends on systematic components such as prior learning, student effort, and inputs from home and school, as well as a stochastic component that reflects imperfect links between actual learning and measured performance. We show that high variance in this stochastic component can generate an equilibrium characterized by high enrollment and high rates of grade repetition, features that are typical of predominantly black schools in South Africa. We also show that higher variance tends to reduce the impact of variables such as prior learning and household income on the probability of grade advancement.
After developing our theoretical model, we analyze the determinants of grade advancement and school enrollment using a rich set of variables from the CAPS. These variables include previous school outcomes, scores on a baseline literacy and numeracy evaluation, and household variables such as income and parental schooling. Our empirical results are highly consistent with our theoretical model. While there is a strong impact of baseline test scores and household income on progress through grades 8–11, the effect is much weaker for African students than for coloured and white students. We interpret this as evidence that the African school environment does a poor job translating ability and resources into measured performance. Also, in line with our model, we find that African students are less likely to drop out of school than coloured students after failing a grade. As a strong test of our model, we show that our results change systematically when we look at pass rates on the nationally standardized grade 12 matriculation exam. The impact of baseline test scores and income are as large for African students as coloured students in predicting pass rates on the grade 12 exam. This suggests that the weaker impact of baseline test scores and income for Africans in grades 8–11 is due to a poor system of evaluation in those grades.
Section snippets
Education and apartheid
Although educational attainment in South Africa is relatively high compared to many African countries, cross-national standardized tests show South African students lagging behind students in other countries, including many African countries (van der Berg and Louw, 2007). One obvious explanation for this poor performance is that it reflects a lingering legacy of the extreme inequality in education that existed under apartheid. The government ran separate school systems for different racial
A stochastic model of grade repetition
While we will not develop a complete theoretical model of school enrollment and progress through school, in this section we discuss a number of important theoretical issues that guide our empirical analysis. We pay close attention to the combination of high enrollment rates and high rates of grade repetition documented in Fig. 1. At the simplest level, advancing through secondary school requires that a student achieves some level of learning sufficient for grade promotion, that the student's
Empirical evidence
In this section we analyze empirical evidence on the determinants of progress through secondary school. We focus in particular on the extent to which empirical evidence is consistent with our stochastic model of grade repetition. Before presenting regression results we begin with a descriptive overview of grade progression for our sample of 8th and 9th graders in 2002.
Alternative explanations and robustness checks
In this section we consider alternative explanations of our results and present a variety of robustness checks. The results presented above are highly consistent with the predictions from our stochastic model of grade repetition. We do not want to overstate the extent to which this is the only explanation for observed patterns in grade repetition, however, and it is important to consider whether other factors can explain the patterns we observe. In this section we discuss other factors that may
Conclusions
Grade repetition is a fundamental feature of the secondary school environment in South Africa. Our Cape Area Panel Study data show that only 27% of African students who were in grade 8 or 9 in 2002 advanced three grades by 2005, even though 2/3 of them were still enrolled in school in 2005. Taking advantage of the panel data on school advancement and the rich set of baseline characteristics in CAPS, we show that baseline cognitive skills and household income are important determinants of
Acknowledgments
Support for this research was provided by the U.S. National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (grants R01HD39788 and R01HD045581), the Fogarty International Center of the U.S. National Institutes of Health (D43TW000657), and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
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