Who Benefits from a Smaller Honors Track?

Abstract

This paper characterizes the efficiency and distributional impact of changing the share of students enrolling in honors classrooms. Using North Carolina high school data, we estimate functions capturing the test score impact of alternative honors enrollment shares by predicted performance quintile. We find that smaller honors tracks (20 percent–30 percent of students) yield moderate performance gains for top-quintile students (∼0.05 − 0.07 score standard deviations relative to trackless courses) that decline monotonically across quintiles toward zero for bottom-quintile students. However, expanding the honors share beyond 30–35 percent generates further (small) gains only for the middle quintile, while reducing top-quintile gains and causing substantial bottom-quintile losses.