摘要：Tens of thousands of young people leave school with no or very few
qualifications in England. This paper seeks to build a fuller picture of Key
Stage 4 low achievement and its correlates than available hitherto. We focus on
three aspects. Firstly, the role of students’ personal characteristics,
especially gender, ethnicity and past achievement, in explaining the incidence
of low achievement at age 16. Secondly, we investigate the extent to which
particular personal characteristics constitute direct risk factors for low
achievement and the extent to which they lead to low achievement because of
their correlation with unobserved school and neighborhood quality, i.e. the role
of sorting into schools and neighborhoods of different quality. We suggest a
method of calculating school quality (how effective a school is in helping its
pupils to avoid low achievement) which is akin to the value-added concept, and
examine which specific observed school characteristics predict this measure of
‘school quality’. Thirdly, the paper examines the relationship between school
resources – particularly per pupil expenditure – and the avoidance of low
achievement, exploiting the panel nature of the National Pupil Database. Going
beyond simple discrete choice models, the paper employs school fixed effects
regression to reduce endogeneity problems and employs panel data at the student
level to analyse school resource effects. A number of interesting findings
emerge about the correlates of low achievement and of school quality, and we
consider the policy implications of our findings.
关键词：Low achievement, school fixed effects, panel data, school resources, England
