Who wins and who loses from school accountability? The distribution of educational gain in English secondary schools

Simon Burgess (), Carol Propper, Deborah Wilson and Helen Slater

No 5248, CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers

Abstract: In 1988 the UK government introduced greater accountability into the English state school sector. But the information that schools are required to make public on their pupil achievement is only partial. The paper examines whether accountability measures based on a partial summary of student achievement influence the distribution of student achievement. Since school ratings only incorporate test results via pass rates, schools have incentives to improve the performance of students who are on the margin of meeting these standards, to the detriment of very low achieving or high achieving pupils. Using pupil level data for a cohort of all students in secondary public sector schools in England, we find that this policy reduces the educational gains and exam performance in high stakes exams of very low ability students.

Keywords: School accountability; High stakes exams; Educational value added (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2005-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu and nep-ure
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (30)

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP5248 (application/pdf)
CEPR Discussion Papers are free to download for our researchers, subscribers and members. If you fall into one of these categories but have trouble downloading our papers, please contact us at subscribers@cepr.org

Related works:
Working Paper: Who wins and who loses from school accountability? The distribution of educational gain in English secondary schools (2005)
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:cpr:ceprdp:5248

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP5248

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers Centre for Economic Policy Research, 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().