School Accountability, Postsecondary Attainment, and Earnings

Abstract

We study the impact of accountability pressure in Texas public high schools in the 1990s on postsecondary attainment and earnings, using administrative data from the Texas Schools Project (TSP). We find that high schools respond to the risk of being rated Low-Performing by increasing student achievement on high-stakes exams. Years later, these students are more likely to have attended college and completed a four-year degree, and they have higher earnings at age 25. However, we find no overall impactand large declines in attainment and earnings for low-scoring students -of pressure to achieve a higher accountability rating. An online appendix is available at: http://www.nber.org/data-appendix/w19444 2 Today's schools must offer a rigorous academic curriculum to prepare students for the rising skill demands of the modern economy (Levy and Murnane, 2004). Yet at least since the publication of A Nation at Risk in 1983, policymakers have acted on the principle that America's schools are failing. The ambitious and far-reaching No Child Left Behind Act of 2002 (NCLB) identified test-based accountability as the key to improved school performance. NCLB mandates that states conduct annual standardized assessments in math and reading, that schools' average performance on assessments be publicized, and that rewards and sanctions be doled out to schools on the basis of their students' performance on the exams.However, more than a decade after the passage of NCLB, we know very little about the impact of test-based accountability on students' long-run life chances. Previous work has found large gains on high-stakes tests, with some evidence of smaller gains on low-stakes exams that is inconsistent across When do improvements on high-stakes tests represent real learning gains? And when do they make students better off in the long-run? The main difficulty in interpreting accountability-induced student achievement gains is that once a measure becomes the basis of assessing performance, it loses its diagnostic value (Campbell 1976, Kerr 1995, Neal 2013. Previous research has focused on measuring performance on low-stakes exams, yet academic achievement is only one of many possible ways that teachers and schools may affect students (Chetty, Friedman and Rockoff 2012, Jackson 2012).While there are many goals of public schooling, test-based accountability is premised on the belief that student achievement gains will lead to long-run improvements in important life outcomes such as educational attainment and earnings. High-stakes testing creates incentives for teachers and schools to adjust their effort toward improving test performance in the short-run. Whether these changes make students better off in the long-run depends critically on the correlation between the actions that schools take to raise test scores, and the resulting changes in earnings and educational attainment at the margin (Holmstrom and Milgrom 1991, Baker 1992, Hout et al., 2011.

The Long-Run Effects of Teacher Strikes: Evidence from Argentina

“…First, no other paper has examined the effects of teacher strikes on student long-run outcomes. Given the large literature demonstrating that short-run program effects on student outcomes can be very different from any effects on long-run outcomes, this is of great value to policy makers (e.g., Chetty et al 2011;Deming et al 2013;Lovenheim and Willén 2016). Second, the frequency and prevalence of teacher strikes that we exploit is much greater than that which has been used in earlier studies.…”

Charter Schools and Labor Market Outcomes

“…Not surprisingly, earnings for individuals with at least four years of college are relatively low for ages 19-22 when these individuals are likely still enrolled in school. Earnings for these individuals sharply increase for ages 22-26, leveling off for ages [26][27][28][29][30]. In contrast, earning trajectories are relatively stable over all ages for individuals with some college, only a high school diploma, or less than a high school diploma.…”

The Long-Run Effects of Teacher Collective Bargaining

“…There currently is only a small literature on the effect of teachers' unions on academic achievement. None of these studies estimate the effect of collective bargaining on long-run labor market and educational attainment outcomes, which may differ from any short-run impacts (Ludwig and Miller 2007, Chetty et al 2011, Deming et al 2013, Cohodes et al 2016. One central reason for this lack of existing work is data constraints: the teacher unionization movement took hold before consistent measures of student outcomes were collected.…”