Sorting, Status, and Shadow Education: How Track Placement Shapes Parental Investment

Educational tracking—separating students into tracks or schools by ability — is commonplace, but access and preferences for top programs often depend on socioeconomic status (SES), reinforcing inequality. We study shadow education in the context of an early-tracking system, exploiting score cut-offs using a pseudo-regression discontinuity design to isolate the causal effect on parental investments. We find that assignment to the highest track disproportionately increases private tutoring among families in the lowest tercile of SES. This suggests tracking activates a behavioral response among disadvantaged households, which may amplify between-track achievement gaps.

Klein, Thilo and Sarah McNamara (2025), Sorting, Status, and Shadow Education: How Track Placement Shapes Parental Investment, ZEW Discussion Paper No. 25-023, Mannheim.