School Accountability: Can We Reward Schools and Avoid Pupil Selection?

Erwin Ooghe () and Erik Schokkaert
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Erwin Ooghe: KU Leuven

No 7420, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: School accountability schemes require measures of school performance, and these measures are in practice often based on pupil test scores. It is well-known that insufficiently correcting these test scores for pupil characteristics may provide incentives for inefficient pupil selection. We show that the trade-off between reward and pupil selection is not only a matter of sufficient information. A school accountability scheme that rewards school performance will create incentives for pupil selection, even under perfect information, unless the educational production function satisfies an (unrealistic) separability assumption. We propose different compromise solutions and discuss the resulting incentives in theory. The empirical relevance of our analysis – i.e., the rejection of the separability assumption and the magnitude of the incentives in the different compromise solutions – is illustrated with Flemish data.

Keywords: school accountability; cream-skimming; educational production function (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H52 I22 I24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 38 pages
Date: 2013-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cta, nep-edu and nep-ure
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Related works:
Journal Article: School accountability: can we reward schools and avoid pupil selection? (2016)
Working Paper: School accountability: can we reward schools and avoid pupil selection? (2016)
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