Nber Working Paper Series Tinkering toward Accolades: School Gaming under a Performance Accountability System
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چکیده
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. Julie Berry Cullen Department of Economics Unviersity of California, San Diego 9500 Gilman Drive La Jolla, CA 92093-0508 and NBER [email protected] Randall Reback Department of Economics Barnard College Columbia University 3009 Broadway New York, NY 10027-6598 [email protected]
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