ABSTRACT
The discussion about whether education systems and their various degrees of differentiation produce inequalities is an ongoing debate in the sociology of education. Most emphasis so far has been on the interaction between tracking and the socio-economic family background of students. Earlier studies pointed to more significant effects for social background in systems where students are selected at an earlier age (Comber & Keeves 1973 and Husen 1967, 1973, both cited in Van de Werfhorst & Mijs 2010: 417). Those findings have been confirmed in recent studies (Breen & Jonsson 2005, for example). If early selection has a negative effect on equality, then inequality is assumed to increase more across transitions in education systems that have a large degree of differentiation.
