School Socio-economic Composition: Mechanisms of the Connection with Students' Outcomes

For nowadays research about the effect of school socio-economic composition on academic performance reveal controversial and incomplete results. To address the gap of knowledge in the field of compositional effects on students’ performance the objectives of present study is to investigate the ways of association between school socio-economic composition and students’ short-term and long-term academic performance. We used Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) and multilevel regression analysis to investigate the data on students from Russian longitudinal survey “Trajectories in Education and Careers”. The main findings of the research suggest that in Russian educational system there is a positive effect of school socio-economic composition on students’ short-term as well as long-term outcomes. It was discovered as well that the effect of school composition is based on such factors as peers’ academic expectations and teacher’s expectations of the progress, but the mechanisms are different for short-term and long-term performance. At the same time, the results suggest that none of the school characteristics could serve as a mechanism of social reproduction.