In the late 1970s, France delayed from age 11 to 13 the separation of students into academic and vocational tracks and replaced it with a less intensive system of grouping students into achievement-based classrooms.
New research supported by the Upjohn Institute Early Career Research Awards program finds three main consequences of the change. First, students, especially those from low-income backgrounds, pursued higher-quality degrees. Second, more women chose partners or spouses in high-skilled occupations and closer to their ages. Third, women from low-income backgrounds had more children by their mid-40s.
The results show that the decisions school systems make about when and how to track students can have long-term consequences for social and economic inequalities, researcher Serena Canaan writes.