Tinkering Toward Accolades: School Gaming Under a Performance Accountability System

We explore the extent to which schools manipulate the composition of students in the test-taking pool in order to maximize ratings under Texas' accountability system in the 1990s. We first derive predictions from a static model of administrators' incentives given the structure of the ratings criteria, and then test these predictions by comparing differential changes in exemption rates across student subgroups within campuses and across campuses and regimes. Our analyses uncover evidence of a moderate degree of strategic behavior, so that there is some tension between designing systems that account for heterogeneity in student populations and that are manipulation-free.

Fiscal Spillovers between Local Governments: Keeping up with the Joneses' School District

Although there is a large theoretical literature concerning tax and expenditure competition between local governments, there is relatively little empirical evidence concerning whether such competition actually occurs. In the context of U.S. public school districts, the fiscal behavior of one district could affect the revenue decisions of other, nearby districts. Using financial and geographic data for every school district in the U.S. from 1972 to 2002, this paper estimates the magnitude of fiscal spillovers between districts. The results confirm that districts' revenues are influenced by exogenous shocks in their neighbors' revenues, especially for districts that are already outspending their neighbors. A one dollar increase in the mean revenues per pupil of nearby districts leads to about a 20-cent increase in a district's own revenues per pupil. These results have important implications for the optimal design of school finance programs

NEPC Review: New York City's Children First: Lessons in School Reform

New York City&rsquo;s Children First: Lessons in School Reform summarizes elementary and secondary level education policy reforms in New York City during Mayor Michael Bloomberg&rsquo;s tenure. Education policy changes in New York City during this time frame, from 2002 through 2013, are collectively known as &ldquo;Children First&rdquo; reforms. The report reviews the elements of these reforms and analyzes their effectiveness both collectively and individually. The New York City school system experienced dramatic changes during this era, and the report does a very nice job of synthesizing important events and facts into a single narrative. The report occasionally goes too far in classifying various policies as successes or failures. In particular, the report overhypes research examining the success of small high schools and of charter schools; a more balanced interpretation of this research literature should lead to a far more neutral tone concerning the success of these schools. To its credit, the report also discusses important questions of systemic governance and policy implementation. Management and accountability systems set up during Children First likely had a tremendous impact on how other reform components were implemented and are also likely to continue to affect how education policies are implemented under the new mayoral regime.</p

Under Pressure: Job Security, Resource Allocation, and Productivity in Schools Under NCLB

The most sweeping federal education law in decades, the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act, requires states to administer standardized exams and to punish schools that do not make Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) for the fraction of students passing these exams. While the literature on school accountability is well-established, there exists no nationwide study of the strong short-term incentives created by NCLB for schools on the margin of failing AYP. We assemble the first comprehensive, national, school-level dataset concerning detailed performance measures used to calculate AYP, and demonstrate that idiosyncrasies in state policies create numerous cases where schools near the margin for satisfying their own state’s AYP requirements would have almost certainly failed or almost certainly made AYP if they were located in other states. Using this variation as a means of identification, we examine the impact of NCLB on the behavior of school personnel and students’ academic achievement in nationally representative samples. We find that accountability pressure from NCLB lowers teachers’ perceptions of job security and causes untenured teachers in high-stakes grades to work longer hours than their peers. We also find that NCLB pressure has either neutral or positive effects on students’ enjoyment of learning and their achievement gains on low-stakes exams in reading, math, and science.

Jockeying for Position: Strategic High School Choice Under Texas' Top Ten Percent Plan

Beginning in 1998, all students in the state of Texas who graduated in the top ten percent of their high school classes were guaranteed admission to any in-state public higher education institution, including the flagships. While the goal of this policy is to improve college access for disadvantaged and minority students, the use of a school-specific standard to determine eligibility could have unintended consequences. Students may increase their chances of being in the top ten percent by choosing a high school with lower-achieving peers. Our analysis of students’ school transitions between 8th and 10th grade three years before and after the policy change reveals that this incentive influences enrollment choices in the anticipated direction. Among the subset of students with both motive and opportunity for strategic high school choice, as many as 25 percent enroll in a different high school to improve the chances of being in the top ten percent. Strategic students tend to choose the neighborhood high school in lieu of more competitive magnet schools and, regardless of own race, typically displace minority students from the top ten percent pool. The net effect of strategic behavior is to slightly decrease minority students’ representation in the pool.

The Impact of College Course Offerings on the Supply of Academically Talented Public School Teachers

University of Michigan forthcoming in the Journal of Econometrics This paper identifies the impact of undergraduate teacher certification programs on the likelihood that recent college graduates enter and remain in public school teaching jobs. More selective postsecondary institutions are far less likely to offer teacher certification programs and those that do offer them are less likely to allow students to complete them within their four undergraduate years. First, to examine the overall relationship between the availability of teacher certification programs and the likelihood that academically talented students enter teaching careers, I combine Barron&apos;s ratings of college selectivity, detailed data tracking college seniors into the workforce, data on the types of teacher certification programs offered by their colleges, and data on states&apos; certification requirements. Next, to isolate the causal effect of program offerings, I treat the selection issue related to students sorting into colleges based on pre-existing interest in teaching careers as an omitted variable problem. Using another data set that surveys high school seniors&apos; career interests and tracks them into college, I estimate an upper bound for the magnitude of the bias in the baseline coefficient estimates. The results suggest that the addition of teacher certification programs that may be completed within four undergraduate years could increase rates of entry into public school teaching by at least 50% among recent graduates of certain selective colleges. JEL Classification: I20, J45, C2

Entry costs and the supply of public school teachers. Education Finance and Policy

Abstract: This paper examines the impact of entry costs on the likelihood that recent college graduates become public school teachers. I combine Barron&apos;s ratings of college selectivity, data on the types of teacher certification programs offered by colleges, and NELS data that tracks members of the high school class of 1988 into college and into the workforce. Restricting the sample to individuals who were not considering teaching careers when they were high school seniors, I estimate the marginal effect of the availability of undergraduate teacher certification programs on the likelihood that these individuals become teachers. The results suggest that graduates from highly selective colleges are very sensitive to entry costs related to the number of years of schooling required for certification, while graduates from less selective colleges are not marginally influenced by these costs.