Elite academic schools in Hungary cherry-pick high achieving students from general primary schools at the age of 10 and 12. There are two channels through which this early-selection in education can increase social inequalities: 1. Elite academic school might provide a higher value-added to the cherry-picked students and 2. those remaining in the general primary tracks might lose due to the high achieving peers leaving the class. This talk will go through the logic of the inequality-increasing process of early selection by gathering empirical evidence that suggests that both of these channels are at work and summarizing results of quasi-experimental papers on the topic and introducing the newest addendum to this line of research, on peer effects, in a bit more detail.
Dániel Horn, PhD, Center for Economic and Regional Studies, Hungarian Academy of Sciences