In 2011 the federal state of Berlin implemented a new admission policy to restructure the transition from primary to secondary school. While restructuring various elements, the reform also aimed at promoting school choice by encouraging and enabling parents to choose among all of Berlin’s secondary schools, regardless of their location and school track, and with that, introducing more market mechanisms into the educational system. In the research literature, market-based reforms in education are discussed critically: School choice and the underlying market mechanisms are associated with fostering school segregation and social inequalities, while evidence for positive effects, like an overall rise of educational quality, is scarce (Waslander et al., 2010). This may be caused by unequally distributed access to better performing schools mixed with socially biased decision-making (Burgess et al., 2014; Wilson & Bridge, 2019). Furthermore, the literature on individual effects of choosing supposedly better schools on academic success is inconclusive, varying between null and slightly positive effects (Beuermann & Jackson, 2020; Jabbar et al., 2019). The recent study builds on this by investigating school choice effects in Berlin. It uses the unique framework of the restructured choice regime to conduct a quasi-experimental study design. For this purpose, the study uses a subsample of students (n = 1077) from the BERLIN-Study (Neumann et al., 2017) who enrolled in non-academic track secondary schools. The majority (80.5 percent) transferred to their first-preference school, while a smaller group (19.5 percent) had to transfer to undersubscribed schools which were not their first preference. Therefore we investigated to what extent these two groups of students differ in core academic and non-academic outcomes by the end of secondary schooling. Using a propensity score matching approach to account for initial differences between the two groups, first results suggest that students transferring to their first-preference schools tend to perform slightly better in standardized achievement tests, are more satisfied with their schools, but have lower academic self-concepts. For learning motivation, exam and transition rates to upper secondary level, no group differences occurred. The findings will be discussed with regard to equity and school effectiveness aspects.

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