Tinkering Toward Accolades: School Gaming Under a Performance Accountability System / Julie Berry Cullen, Randall Reback.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Cullen, Julie Berry.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Reback, Randall.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w12286.

NBER working paper series no. w12286

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Other Title:

Tinkering Toward Accolades

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2006.

Summary:

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.

Notes:

Print version record

June 2006.