Beyond Incentives: Do Schools Use Accountability Rewards Productively?

We use a regression discontinuity design to analyze an understudied aspect of school accountability systems-how schools use financial rewards. For two years, California's accountability system financially rewarded schools based on a deterministic function of test scores. Qualifying schools rece...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inJournal of business & economic statistics Vol. 30; no. 1; pp. 149 - 163
Main Authors Bacolod, Marigee, DiNardo, John, Jacobson, Mireille
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Alexandria Taylor & Francis 01.01.2012
American Statistical Association
Taylor & Francis Ltd
Subjects
Academic achievement
Accountability
Accountability rewards
Application programming interfaces
California public schools
Disadvantaged schools
Economic statistics
High schools
Monetary incentives
NCLB
Payments
Polynomials
Regression analysis
Regression discontinuity
School districts
School enrollment
School performance
Schools
Social disadvantage
Studies
Test scores
United States > US
California
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Summary:We use a regression discontinuity design to analyze an understudied aspect of school accountability systems-how schools use financial rewards. For two years, California's accountability system financially rewarded schools based on a deterministic function of test scores. Qualifying schools received per-pupil awards amounting to about 1% of statewide per-pupil spending. Corroborating anecdotal evidence that awards were paid out as teacher bonuses, we find no evidence that winning schools purchased more instructional material, increased teacher hiring, or changed the subject-specific composition of their teaching staff. Most importantly, we find no evidence that student achievement increased in winning schools. Supplemental materials for this article are available online.
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ISSN:0735-0015
1537-2707
DOI:10.1080/07350015.2012.637868