Neighborhood-School Sorting and School Effects on Primary School Outcomes

Neighborhoods and schools are key extrafamilial contexts shaping children’s educational outcomes. Residential and school selection are often closely intertwined: some parents move to access desirable schools, or choose schools depending on residential constraints. Yet most research on contextual effects treats these processes as a statistical identification problem rather than as a substantive topic of interest. In this study, we develop a new way of thinking about residential choice and school effects. Instead of asking whether neighborhoods and schools have independent effects on student outcomes, we ask whether considering the school supply in residential choice matters for children’s education. In other words, does school-motivated residential mobility pay off in terms of children’s academic performance? Using geo-coded longitudinal register data from the four largest Dutch cities (Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague, and Utrecht), we examine how families sort into neighborhoods-school structures and how this shapes children’s formal track recommendations in the transition to secondary school. We find that university-educated families are somewhat more likely to relocate to neighborhoods with higher-reputation schools, net of other neighborhood features. However, we find no evidence that (contextual effects on) educational outcomes depend on whether parents consider the school supply in their residential choices.