RAISING EDUCATIONAL STANDARDS: NEW EVIDENCE ON THE EFFECTIVENESS OF SCHOOL ACCOUNTABILITY SYSTEMS IN THE UNITED STATES

In the first independent study to examine the impact of the federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) on the test-score performance of individual students, Harvard researchers Martin West and Paul Peterson find that key provisions of the Florida A+ Accountability Plan have been more effective than NCLB provisions at leveraging gains in student achievement.

The research, which is published in the March 2006 issue of the Economic Journal, finds that fourth and fifth grade students in Florida make modest but significant gains in reading and mathematics if their school receives an ‘F’ grade from the state’s school accountability system, a grade that places it at risk of becoming a part of the state’s school voucher programme. Florida students in schools at risk of becoming subject to the public-school choice provisions of the NCLB show no improvement.

However, the report also stresses that the research findings pertain solely to the school choice provisions as they operate in Florida (and not necessarily how NCLB choice provisions are operating more generally), and they should not be taken as a measure of the overall effectiveness of either NCLB or the Florida A+ Plan. Since 2002, average test scores among fourth and fifth graders in Florida have risen significantly.

The Florida A + Plan gives students an opportunity to take a voucher to go to a private school, if their public school twice receives an ‘F’ in any four-year period. As soon as a public school receives its first ‘F’, it is at risk of losing students to other public and private schools. Only by escaping the ‘F’ designation in the subsequent year can the school avoid being incorporated into the voucher programme.

The 24 Florida elementary schools that received their first ‘F’ in the summer of 2002 responded positively to the challenge. In the following school year, their students scored 4-5% of a standard deviation higher than did students at comparable schools not subject to the voucher threat. The test-score gain, though initially small, would become quite large were it to continue at the same rate for the entire period the schools remained threatened by the loss of students.

The gains made by ‘F’ schools were over and above similar gains made by the 8% of elementary schools receiving ‘D’ grades, which seem to have responded positively to the stigma of being identified as a low-performing school.

No such gains were observed at schools threatened by the public-school choice provisions of No Child Left Behind. In Florida’s Title I schools, students may move to another public school within the district, if their school is designated as not making adequate yearly progress for two consecutive years. Students at schools subjected to this threat in the summer of 2003 did no better the following school year than students at similar schools not subject to the threat.

The authors point to two factors that may explain why NCLB’s choice provisions did not have a significant impact on school performance: the large number of schools identified as poor performers and the limited choices available to parents in those schools. In 2003, nearly 75% of Florida’s schools were said to be not making adequate progress. US Department of Education data showed that less than 1% of students change from one public school to another during the 2003-04 school year.

West and Peterson’s study draws upon the individual test-score records of 900,000 elementary school students in Florida for the years 2002-2004. Impacts of accountability programmes are estimated after adjusting for prior test scores and demographic background of students and the social composition of their peer group.

ENDS

Notes for editors: ‘The Efficacy of Choice Threats within School Accountability Systems: Evidence from Legislatively Induced Experiments’ by Martin West and Paul Peterson is published in the March 2006 issue of the Economic Journal.

The authors are at Harvard University.

For further information: contact Martin West on +1-202-797-6179 (email: mrwest@fas.harvard.edu); or Romesh Vaitilingam on 0117-983-9770 or 07768-661095 (email: romesh@compuserve.com).