The Impact of Length of the School Year on Student Performance and Earnings: Evidence from the German Short School Years

By Jörn-Steffen Pischke. Social Science Research Network, 2007

304 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper investigates how changing the length of school year, leaving the basic curriculum unchanged, affects learning and subsequent earnings. I use variation introduced by the West-German short school years in 1966-67, which exposed some students to a total of about two thirds of a year less of schooling while enrolled. I show that the short school years led indeed to shorter schooling for affected students. Using comparisons across cohorts, states, and secondary school tracks, I find that the short school years increased grade repetition in primary school, but had no adverse effect on the number of students attending the highest secondary school track or earnings later in life. (This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Education, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1c6f0a31376bb9fe0cf556768fd34e2682e7facd

Citations in the corpus

• The more, the better? The impact of instructional time on student performance (2017, unknown): “In addition, some studies that look at the length of the school year and its impact on later earnings (Grogger 1996 or Pischke 2007) do not find statistically significant results.”
• The Effect of Education on Fertility: Evidence from a Compulsory Schooling Reform (2012, unknown): “and long school years, which some states performed simultaneously to the extension of compulsory schooling (Pischke, 2007).”
• Assessing the Effect of School Days and Absences on Test Score Performance. CEP Discussion Paper No. 1302. (2014, unknown): “23 Pischke (2007) found no effect on earnings.”
• What a difference a day makes: Estimating daily learning gains during kindergarten and first grade using a natural experiment (2011, unknown): “Pischke (2007) exploits variation in instructional time created by the German " short school years " of 1966 and 1967 and finds that the shorter school years were associated with a small increase in grade repetition in primary school and a decrease in enrollment in more advanced secondary school…”
• The Cost of Grade Retention (2012, unknown): “Precisely because of this tradeoff, in the USA the emphasis now seems to have shifted towards policies the combine grade retention – so to preserve the incentive effect – with remedial interventions - to attenuate the negative consequences of repetition and potentially make failure less likely in th”
• Changes in Compulsory Schooling, Education and the Distribution of Wages in Europe (2009, unknown): “We refer to reader to Pischke et al. (2005), and Pischke (2003), for a description of the compulsory school reforms and for the selection of the first cohort potentially affected in each German Länder.”