Tinkering Toward Accolades: School Gaming Under a Performance Accountability System

No 12286, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: 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.

JEL-codes: D82 H39 I28 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2006-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu and nep-ure
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (114)

Published as Gronberg. T. and D. Jansen (eds.) Improving School Accountability: Check-Ups or Choice, Advances in Applied Microeconomics 14. Amsterdam: Elsevier Science, 2006.

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Working Paper: Tinkering toward accolades: School gaming under a performance accountability system (2006)
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