Abstract:

Despite extensive research on school effects, the overall magnitude of a school's influence on student outcomes remains insufficiently delineated. This study aims to quantify the scope of high schools' differential impact and thereby advance understanding of school effects. We place an upper bound on the impact of Israeli secondary schools on students' end-of-school outcomes, specifically on earning a high-quality matriculation certificate that qualifies for admission to higher education. The dataset comprises 597,709 students who attended 8th grade between 2002 and 2018 in schools that administered national standardized MEITZAV tests in mathematics, mother tongue (Hebrew or Arabic), English, and science; their matriculation (Bagrut) examination results from Grades 10, 11, and 12 during 2006-2022; and information on parental education, socioeconomic status based on residential area, and demographic characteristics including gender, relative age within cohort, number of siblings, peripheral residence, and immigrant status.

In the first stage, we estimated for each student the predicted probability of:
(a) earning a matriculation certificate by Grade 12 and
(b) ranking within the top 40 percent of their examination cohort; both as a function of 8th-grade national test scores, socioeconomic status, and demographic characteristics. Predictive power stemmed primarily from prior achievement (test results) and, to a lesser extent, from socioeconomic status, while other demographic variables, such as gender and relative age, were statistically significant but smaller. Predictions were estimated separately by 8th-grade cohort.

In the second stage, these individual predictions were aggregated to produce school-level expected success rates, which were then regressed on actual eligibility rates. Because eighth-grade tests cover either one-half or one-third of each national cohort, adjacent cohorts were grouped into multi-year clusters, comprising approximately 85,000 tested students and 765 schools per cluster, on average.

Results show that predicted eligibility rates explain 83-86 percent of the variance in school-level matriculation outcomes, implying an upper bound of no more than 17 percent on high schools' differential contribution to student success. Moreover, coefficients estimated from earlier cohorts predict 81-83 percent of between-school variation many years later, demonstrating strong intertemporal stability. These findings highlight the limited differential influence of Israeli high schools on student outcomes, a pattern consistent with the highly centralized structure of Israel's education system, in which nearly all schools are publicly funded and similarly regulated by the national Ministry of Education.

This paper demonstrates the possibility of using nationwide standardized tests administered in the year preceding high school as a basis for early, data-driven intervention. A similar study conducted in Victoria, Australia yielded comparable results, suggesting that these findings may generalize to other countries with similar settings.

Keywords:

School effects, Academic Achievement, Value-added methodology, Socioeconomic factors, Educational policy, Matriculation eligibility, Forecasting Matriculation Success.