Policy Seed Grant | 2006-2007

The Effects of No Child Left Behind in School Services and Student Outcomes

by 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 with pass rates not meeting targets are designated as not meeting Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP), and may be subject to a loss of students and funding. This project will examine how many schools respond to the incentives created by states' NCLB school accountability programs. The analyses will combine school-level NCLB data with student-level, teacher-level, and school-level data from the restricted-use version of the nationally representative Early Childhood Longitudinal Survey (ECLS). Some schools have moderate probabilities of meeting AYP so that they are on the margin for meeting AYP that year. Given varying requirements and exam difficulty across states, we can identify the effects of schools being on the margin by comparing intra-state and inter-state differences. We will compare differences in outcomes for schools on the margin and not on the margin within the same state with differences in outcomes for similar schools in other states where neither school is on the margin. We will identify how incentives affect acquisition of various academic skills, as well as how incentives affect educational inputs. The advantages of using the ECLS data are that they contain information concerning a wide variety of services and outcomes, but the survey responses were not gathered in the context of an NCLB study.