The Effects of No Child Left Behind on School Services and Student Outcomes
The Effects of No Child Left Behind on School Services and Student Outcomes
by Jonah Rockoff (Business) and Randall Reback (Economics, Barnard)
The purpose of this research project is to study whether the incentives built into the
current version of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) have a net positive impact on students’
academic achievement, students’ non-academic outcomes, and school resource allocation.
NCLB is a fully developed intervention. It requires states to administer standardized exams to students and to rate schools based on the fraction of students passing these exams. Most
importantly, it provides accountability and incentives to schools; those that fail to meet targets of Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) may be subject to a loss of students and funding. Using quasi-experimental methods, our project will evaluate the efficacy of the accountability pressure put on schools that expect to be near the margin for meeting AYP. The comparison condition in our study will be the absence of accountability pressure placed on similar schools that expect to be far from the AYP margin. Unlike previous work on NCLB, the population studied will be a nationally representative sample of schools and students.
Our primary research method for measuring the impact of school accountability incentives is quasi-experimental. The characteristics of schools on the AYP margin can differ greatly across states due to variation in state-specific requirements and exam difficulty, and we exploit this cross-state policy variation to identify the impact of incentives via a cross-state, difference-in-differences strategy. We are comparing differences in various outcomes across schools that are either close to or far from the AYP margin within the same state with differences in outcomes for similar schools in other states where neither school is on the AYP margin. We are also looking within schools to see whether NCLB incentives differentially affected subgroups of students whose individual outcomes might have a disproportionate influence on the school’s AYP outcome.
The key measures of school accountability pressure will come from a national dataset on NCLB-related test outcomes and AYP performance at the school level, which we will construct from multiple sources. The key outcomes in our study come from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Survey-Kindergarten Class of 1998-99 (ECLS-K) data. We have gained access to the restricted-use version of the ECLS-K, which identifies individual schools and can therefore be linked with school accountability measures. The ECLS-K contains data on a nationally representative sample of students in one of the first cohorts tested under NCLB. It follows individual students over time and includes a broad set of outcome variables: student achievement in reading and mathematics, measures of student behavior, and measures of teacher and school resource allocation.
We believe that this project represents a unique opportunity for a rigorous national evaluation of the efficacy of the accountability incentives created by NCLB. The results of our study will be valuable for teachers, principals, and communities nationwide. They could influence how federal policy-makers choose to re-structure NCLB during future re-authorizations and could affect how state policy-makers design specific accountability systems in compliance with NCLB.
