Senior-secondary vocational tracking and socio-economic inequality in student educational performance: Evidence from the Taiwan education panel survey

Engaged in longstanding debates over the impacts of education tracking on educational inequality, this paper aims to examine whether senior-secondary vocational tracking has contributed to socio-economic inequality in student educational performance in Taiwan. Furthermore, this paper goes one step further to compare if there is any difference between education tracks in the level of socio-economic inequality in student performance. Methodologically, ordinary least squares (OLS) multiple regressions, together with bootstrapped Sobel tests, are adopted to study the research questions, based on the data derived from the Taiwan Education Panel Survey (TEPS). This paper finds that vocational tracking could reinforce the influence of family socio-economic backgrounds and contribute to socio-economic inequality in student performance. In addition, compared to the vocational track, family socio-economic backgrounds are found to have larger impacts in determining student performance in the academic track. Such a track difference might be partially explained by the divergent pattern of parenting practices between tracks, including parent discipline and parental investment in private tutoring. To reduce socio-economic inequality in student performance, this paper proposes several policy suggestions that are tailored to the different circumstances of the two education tracks of Taiwan’s senior-secondary education system. Copyright © 2024 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.