  In many countries, teachers' track recommendations are used to allocate
students to secondary school tracks. Previous studies have shown that students
from families with low socioeconomic status (SES) receive lower track
recommendations than their peers from high SES families, conditional on
standardized test scores. It is often argued that this indicates teacher bias.
However, this claim is invalid in the presence of measurement error in test
scores. We discuss how measurement error in test scores generates a biased
coefficient of the conditional SES gap, and consider three empirical strategies
to address this bias. Using administrative data from the Netherlands, we find
that measurement error explains 35 to 43% of the conditional SES gap in track
recommendations.
