Teaching to the Rating: School Accountability and the Distribution of Student Achievement

This paper examines whether minimum competency school accountability systems, such as those created under No Child Left Behind, influence the distribution of student achievement. Because school ratings in these systems only incorporate students’ test scores via pass rates, this type of system increases incentives for schools to improve the performance of students who are on the margin of passing but does not increase short-run incentives for schools to improve other students’ performance. Using student-level, panel data from Texas during the 1990’s, I explicitly calculate schools’ short-run incentives to improve various students’ expected performance, and I find that schools do respond to these incentives. Students perform better than expected when their test score is particularly important for their schools’ accountability rating. Also, low achieving students perform better than expected in math when many of their classmates’ math scores are important for the schools’ rating, while relatively high achieving students do not perform better. Distributional effects appear to be related to broad changes in resources or instruction, as well as narrowly tailored attempts to improve the performance of specific students.