What matters more when we evaluate a school’s contribution to a child’s future: reading and math test scores or students’ opinions about its academic environment? A new working paper by economists from MIT, Brown, and University of California, Berkeley tackles that question with a unique data set from New York City, the nation’s largest district. The study provides evidence that test-based value-added models are especially informative about a school’s impact on college-going.
Over the past decade, fourteen states and numerous districts have woven student and teacher perception surveys—often termed “school climate” surveys—into their school accountability dashboards. Former New York mayor Bill de Blasio expanded the use of surveys in the school accountability system during his tenure, and New York schools are now required to report aggregated measures of student responses to questions such as whether they “learn a lot from feedback on their work.” These data are then included in the school accountability system and reported publicly alongside academic results. Advocates say the surveys capture critical relational factors missing in standardized tests results, but skeptics argue they are vague, easily gamed, and only weakly tied to long‑term learning.
To test the predictive value of these surveys, the researchers linked three streams of information: aggregated climate survey responses for each school, test‑score value‑added measures at the school level, and student records. By comparing otherwise similar students who happened to attend different schools, the authors isolated each school’s effect on outcomes including on‑time high school graduation, advanced diploma attainment, college entry, and college persistence. Importantly, only test scores were available in a value‑added format; survey data entered the models as simple school averages, lacking any controls or measures of change over time.
The results show that both school climate measures and test score value-added measures can be informative. Yet climate surveys outperform test‑score value‑added only on one outcome: earning a standard Regents diploma. For every more demanding milestone, including advanced diplomas and college-going, test‑score value‑added is a much stronger predictor of a school’s true impact, and survey measures add little once academic gains are taken into account. In other words, a warm school climate may help students clear the minimum graduation bar, but it is sustained academic growth, as measured in this study by test scores, that makes a school more likely to propel students into and through college.
These findings arrive just as New York City begins to publish value‑added indicators for graduation and college enrollment, giving families a clearer view of which schools actually change students’ trajectories. As other jurisdictions debate whether to raise the weight of non‑academic measures in their accountability systems, the evidence suggests that, while climate surveys do capture something real, relying on them alone is a risky strategy if the goal is genuine college readiness.
Reviewed: Joshua Angrist, Peter Hull, Russell Legate-Yang, Parag A. Pathak and Christopher R. Walters, Putting School Surveys to the Test, NBER (2025). https://www.nber.org/papers/w33622.
