TY  - RPRT
        AU  - Canaan, Serena
AU  - Mouganie, Pierre
AU  - Zhang, Peng
        TI  - The Long-Run Educational Benefits of High-Achieving Classrooms
        PY  - 2022/Jan/
        PB  - Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)
        CY  - Bonn
        T2  - IZA Discussion Paper
        IS  - 15039
        UR  - https://www.iza.org/publications/dp15039
        AB  - 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. 
        KW  - teacher quality
KW  - peer quality
KW  - classroom tracking
KW  - regression discontinuity
KW  - China
        ER  -