An opportunity-performance trade-off and institutional strategies: The role of secondary school characteristics

Secondary schools aim to provide students with opportunities to develop their talents and ensure minimum levels of academic performance. These two goals may conflict in practice. This study examines how schools navigate this potential trade-off using data from the Netherlands Cohort Study on Education (NCO). We argue that schools can be ranked on two different analytical dimensions. The first one is quality, the extent to which schools can achieve both goals simultaneously. The second one is relative preference, the extent to which the educational practices in a school favour one goal (opportunity) over the other (performance). Our results suggest that institutional features critically shape how schools balance educational aims. In particular, practices favouring less-strict tracking are associated with quality, that is achieving both aims simultaneously.