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
The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) requires states to administer standardized exams to students and to rate schools based on the fraction of students passing these exams. Schools failing to meet targets of Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) may be subject to a loss of students and funding. While NCLB may motivate all schools to improve academic achievement for all students, the program's details create disproportionate incentives for particular schools to improve the achievement of particular students on particular achievement exams. Our analyses will examine school' responses to these incentives using two data sets that are not currently publicly available, but ideal for this purpose. We will combine hand-collected school-level NCLB data with the ECLS-K, a nationally representative sample of students, teachers, and schools for one of the first student cohorts educated under NCLB. The ECLS-K contains panel data on student achievement measured by nationwide exams that are not high stakes, allowing for a powerful test of the impact of NCLB on general academic achievement. We hypothesize that schools near the margin of meeting AYP are likely to be most affected by the law's incentives. Yet the characteristics of schools on the AYP margin can differ greatly across states due to variation in state-specific requirements and exam difficulty. We will compare differences in student academic and behavioral outcomes who are in schools on or away 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 will also look within schools to see whether NCLB incentives differentially affected subgroups of students whose individual outcomes had a disproportionate influence on the school's AYP outcome. By developing a more nuanced understanding of the national impact of NCLB, we will provide essential feedback for future policy decisions.
