Accountability Pressure and Non-Achievement Student Behaviors. Working Paper 122 (original) (raw)
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Accountability Pressure and Non-Achievement Student Behaviors
Social Science Research Network, 2015
In this paper we examine how failing to make adequate yearly progress under No Child Left Behind (NCLB), and the accountability pressure that ensues, affects various non-achievement student behaviors. Using administrative data from North Carolina and leveraging a discontinuity in the determination of school failure, we examine the causal impact of accountability pressure both on student behaviors that are incentivized by NCLB and on those that are not. We find evidence that, as NCLB intends, pressure encourages students to show up at school and to do so on time. Accountability pressure also has the unintended effect, however, of increasing the number of student misbehaviors such as suspensions, fights, and offenses reportable to law enforcement. Further, this negative response is most pronounced among minorities and low performing students, who are the most likely to be left behind.
Economics of Education Review, 2017
In this paper we examine how failing to make adequate yearly progress under No Child Left Behind (NCLB), and the accountability pressure that ensues, affects various non-achievement student behaviors. Using administrative data from North Carolina and leveraging a discontinuity in the determination of school failure, we examine the causal impact of this form of accountability pressure both on student behaviors that are incentivized by NCLB and on those that are not. We find evidence that, as NCLB intends, pressure encourages students to show up at school and to do so on time. Accountability pressure also appears to have the unintended effect, however, of increasing the number of student misbehaviors. Further, we find some evidence that this negative response is most pronounced among minorities and low performing students: those who are the most likely to be left behind.
Educational Researcher, 2009
The federal accountability system, made universal through the No Child Left Behind Act of 2002, is a system driven by quotas and sanctions, stipulating the progression of underperforming schools through sanctions based on meeting performance quotas for specific demographic groups. The authors examine whether the current federal accountability system is likely to succeed or fail, by asking, Does the sanctions-driven accountability system work? Is it practical? And is it legitimate among those who must implement it? The authors argue that even though sanctions-driven accountability may fail on practical outcomes, it may be retained for its secondary benefits and because there is a sense that credible policy alternatives are lacking. They conclude by proposing alternative policies and approaches to the current system.
The Civil Rights Project, 2005
This report examines how state policymakers designed their accountability systems to meet the NCLB Title I requirements and the implications of its provisions for schools with large numbers of low-income and minority students. We conducted our study in six states—Arizona, California, Illinois, New York, Virginia, and Georgia—which are geographically, politically, and demographically diverse. First, we examine how these six states designed their accountability systems to meet the Title I accountability requirements, including the interaction of the federal requirements and state accountability systems. Second, we examine the effect of the Title I adequate yearly progress (AYP) requirements on high-poverty and high-minority schools in these six states. Third, we explore the impact of subgroup accountability rules in California's public schools. We focus our subgroup analysis on California, since it is the state with the most ethnically and socially diverse public schools
Status versus growth: The distributional effects of school accountability policies
Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, 2010
Although the federal No Child Left Behind program judges the effectiveness of schools based on their students' achievement status, many policy analysts argue that schools should be measured, instead, by their students' achievement growth. Using a tenyear student-level panel dataset from North Carolina, we examine how school-specific pressure associated with the two approaches to school accountability affects student achievement at different points in the prior-year achievement distribution. Achievement gains for students below the proficiency cut point emerge in response to both types of accountability systems. In contrast to prior research highlighting the possibility of educational triage, we find little or no evidence that schools in North Carolina ignore the students far below proficiency under either approach. Importantly, we find that the status, but not the growth, approach reduces the reading achievement of higher performing students, with the losses in the aggregate exceeding the gains at the bottom. Our analysis suggests that the distributional effects of accountability pressure depend not only on the type of pressure for which schools are held accountable (status or growth), but also the tested subject.
NBER WORKING PAPER SERIES SHORT RUN IMPACTS OF ACCOUNTABILITY ON SCHOOL QUALITY
In November of 2007, the New York City Department of Education assigned elementary and middle schools a letter grade (A to F) under a new accountability system. Grades were based on numeric scores derived from student achievement and other school environmental factors such as attendance, and were linked to a system of rewards and consequences. We use the discontinuities in the assignment of grades to estimate the impact of accountability in the short run. Specifically, we examine student achievement in English Language Arts and mathematics (measured in January and March of 2008, respectively) using school level aggregate data. Although schools had only a few months to respond to the release of accountability grades, we find that receipt of a low grade significantly increased student achievement in both subjects, with larger effects in math. We find no evidence that these grades were related to the percentage of students tested, implying that accountability can cause real changes in school quality that increase student achievement over a short time horizon. We also find that parental evaluations of educational quality improved for schools receiving low accountability grades. However, changes in survey response rates hold open the possibility of selection bias in these complementary results.
Incentives and responses under No Child Left Behind: credible threats and the role of competition
2011
The No Child Left Behind law mandated the institution of adequate yearly progress (AYP) objectives, on which schools are assigned a pass or fail. Fail status is associated with negative publicity and often sanctions. In this paper, I study the incentives and responses of schools that failed AYP once. Using data from the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction and regression discontinuity designs, I find evidence in these schools of improvements in high-stakes reading and spillover effects to low-stakes language arts. The patterns are consistent with a focus on marginal students around the high-stakes cutoff, but this improvement did not come at the expense of the ends. Meanwhile, there is little evidence of improvement in high-stakes math or in low-stakes science and social studies. Performance in low-stakes grades suffered, as did performance in weaker subgroups despite their inclusion in AYP computations. While there is no evidence of robust effects in either test participation...
The influence of an NCLB accountability plan on the distribution of student test score gains
Economics of Education Review, 2008
Previous research on the effect of accountability programs on the distribution of student test score gains is decidedly mixed. This study examines the issue by estimating an educational production function in which test score gains are a function of the incentives schools have to focus instruction on below-proficient students. NCLB's threat of sanctions are positively correlated with test score gains by below-proficient students in failing schools; greater than expected test score gains by below-proficient students do not occur at the expense of high-performing students in failing schools. This pattern of results tends to suggest that failing schools were able to benefit low-performing students in ways that were consistent with having operational slack, and that the threat of sanctions may stimulate greater productivity within failing schools. r