What a difference a good school makes! Persistence in academic performance and the impact of school quality
Stellenbosch Working Paper Series No. WP07/2017 (revised, version: 3)Publication date: June 2017
Author(s):
[protected email address] (Department of Economics, Stellenbosch University)
In this paper we utilise a unique longitudinal school dataset from the Western Cape province of South Africa. We first explore the degree of persistence in the academic performance of learners over time in order to illustrate the importance of early detection of poor performance within the system. Thereafter, we make use of the longitudinal nature of the dataset in order to estimate the impact of school quality on academic performance following a fixed effects approach. We find that moving from a weaker school to a top performing school (a school within the top 20% of the performance distribution) is associated with an increase of 28% of a standard deviation in performance in mathematics, which translates to almost 1 additional year of education. For language, the impact is smaller at 6% of a standard deviation. However, this grows to 12% of a standard deviation for the sample of black learners, who might benefit the most from moving to a high performing school where the language used for instruction in all other subjects is taught well. These findings have important policy conclusions within the South African context, where school quality is heterogeneous and the weak performance of schools at the bottom of the performance distribution contribute to the perpetuation of poverty over time.
JEL Classification:I21, I24, I28, J13, O15
Keywords:School quality, school choice, longitudinal data, South Africa
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Monday 13 October 202512:10-13:10
Prof Euan Phimister: Stellenbosch Business School
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Topic: "Allocative Efficiency, Labour Shares, and Corporate Lobbying in European Manufacturing"
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BER Weekly
26 Sep 2025 Free Weekly Review | Number 37 | 26 SeptemberThis report covers the key domestic and international data releases over the past week. The more comprehensive BER Weekly Review (Enhanced Version) includes a detailed discussion on the main economic events and developments over the past week, a summary of upcoming data (the week ahead) and the BER’s forecast for key economic indicators....
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