Advanced Search
MyIDEAS: Login

Beyond Incentives: Do Schools use Accountability Rewards Productively?

Contents:

Author Info

  • Marigee Bacolod
  • John DiNardo
  • Mireille Jacobson

Abstract

"Accountability mandates" -- the explicit linking of school funding, resources, and autonomy to student performance on standardized exams -- have proliferated in the last 10 years. In this paper, we examine California's accountability system, which for several years financially rewarded schools based on a deterministic function of test scores. The sharp discontinuity in the assignment rule -- schools that barely missed their target received no funding -- generates "as good as random" assignment of awards for schools near their eligibility threshold and enables us to estimate the (local average) treatment effect of California's financial award program. This design allows us to explore an understudied aspect of accountability systems -- how schools use their financial rewards. Our findings indicate that California's accountability system significantly increased resources allocated to some schools. In the 2000 school year, the average value of the award was about 60 dollars per student and 50 dollars in 2001. Moreover, we find that the total resources flowing to districts with schools that received awards increased more than dollar for dollar. This resource shift was greatest for districts with schools that qualified for awards in the 2000 school year,the first year of the program, increasing total per pupil revenues by roughly 5 percent. Despite the increase in revenues, we find no evidence that these resources increased student achievement. Schools that won awards did not purchase more instructional material, such as computers, which may be inputs into achievement. Although the awards were likely paid out as teacher bonuses, we cannot detect any effect of these bonuses on test scores or other measures of achievement. More worrisome, we also find a practical effect of assigning the award based in part on the performance of "numerically significant subgroups" within a school was to reduce the relative resources of schools attended by traditionally disadvantaged students.

Download Info

If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the proper application to view it first. In case of further problems read the IDEAS help page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w14775.pdf
Download Restriction: no

Bibliographic Info

Paper provided by National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc in its series NBER Working Papers with number 14775.

as in new window
Length:
Date of creation: Mar 2009
Date of revision:
Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:14775

Note: ED LS PE
Contact details of provider:
Postal: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.
Phone: 617-868-3900
Email:
Web page: http://www.nber.org
More information through EDIRC

Related research

Keywords:

Find related papers by JEL classification:

This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

References

References listed on IDEAS
Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
as in new window
  1. Kenneth Y. Chay & Patrick J. McEwan & Miguel Urquiola, 2003. "The Central Role of Noise in Evaluating Interventions that Use Test Scores to Rank Schools," NBER Working Papers 10118, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
  2. Baicker, Katherine & Jacobson, Mireille, 2007. "Finders keepers: Forfeiture laws, policing incentives, and local budgets," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 91(11-12), pages 2113-2136, December.
Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

Citations

Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
as in new window

Cited by:
  1. Pierre Koning, 2010. "School responsiveness to quality ranking: An empirical analysis of secondary education in the Netherlands," CPB Discussion Paper 149, CPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis.
  2. Ginger Zhe Jin & Alex Whalley, 2007. "The Power of Attention: Do Rankings Affect the Financial Resources of Public Colleges?," NBER Working Papers 12941, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
  3. Craig, Steven G. & Imberman, Scott A. & Perdue, Adam, 2013. "Does it pay to get an A? School resource allocations in response to accountability ratings," Journal of Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 73(1), pages 30-42.

Lists

This item is not listed on Wikipedia, on a reading list or among the top items on IDEAS.

Statistics

Access and download statistics

Corrections

When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:14775

For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: ().

If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

If references are entirely missing, you can add them using this form.

If the full references list an item that is present in RePEc, but the system did not link to it, you can help with this form.

If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.