Carrot and Stick? Impact of a Low-Stakes School Accountability Program on Student Achievement

Seokjin Woo (), Soohyung Lee and Kyunghee Kim ()
Additional contact information
Seokjin Woo: Myongji University
Kyunghee Kim: Korea Institute for Curriculum and Evaluation

No 9458, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: A key concern in the design of education policies relates to the structure of incentives in accountability systems. This paper examines a school accountability program that provides financial support to low-performing schools but has no direct punishment scheme for recipients who do not exhibit improvement. Although the program does not include high-stakes consequences, our estimates indicate that the program reduced the share of underperforming students by 18 percent. This paper's results suggest that to improve student achievement, a school accountability program does not need to set high-stakes consequences that potentially induce unwanted strategic behaviors on the part of school workers.

Keywords: school performance; student achievement; school accountability; fuzzy regression discontinuity design (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C5 I2 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 14 pages
Date: 2015-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu and nep-ure
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Published - published in: Economics Letters, 2015, 137 195 - 199

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Journal Article: Carrot and stick?: Impact of a low-stakes school accountability program on student achievement (2015)
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