School Performance, Accountability and Waiver Reforms: Evidence from Louisiana

Thomas Dee and Elise Dizon-Ross

No 23463, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: States that received federal waivers to the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act were required to implement reforms in designated "Focus Schools" that contribute to achievement gaps. In this study, we examine the performance effects of such "differentiated accountability" reforms in the state of Louisiana. The Focus School reforms in Louisiana emphasized school-needs assessments and aligned technical assistance. These state reforms may have also been uniquely high-powered because they were linked to a new letter-based school-rating system. We examine the impact of these reforms in a sharp regression discontinuity (RD) design based on the assignment of schools to Focus status. We find that, over each of three years, Louisiana's Focus School reforms had no measurable impact on school performance. We discuss evidence that these findings may reflect policy uncertainty and implementation fidelity at the state and local level.

JEL-codes: H70 I2 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu and nep-ure
Note: ED
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Published as Thomas S. Dee & Elise Dizon-Ross, 2019. "School Performance, Accountability, and Waiver Reforms: Evidence From Louisiana," Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, vol 41(3), pages 316-349.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w23463.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:23463

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w23463

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().