Tinkering toward accolades: School gaming under a performance accountability system

Randall Reback () and Julie Cullen

No 601, Working Papers from Barnard College, Department of Economics

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.

Keywords: school accountability; performance standard; caseload manipulation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D82 H39 I28 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 46 pages
Date: 2006-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu, nep-pbe and nep-ure
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Working Paper: Tinkering Toward Accolades: School Gaming Under a Performance Accountability System (2006)
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