This study examines the impact of test-based accountability on teacher attendance and student achievement using data from North Carolina. Under the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), schools that failed to make “Adequate Yearly Progress” (AYP) toward universal proficiency in consecutive years faced a series of escalating sanctions. Thus, teachers at schools that failed one year had a strong incentive to boost achievement in the next, while those at other schools faced a weaker incentive.
Using a difference-in-differences approach that compares these groups, the author estimates that failing to make AYP in NCLB’s first year led to a 10 percent decline in teacher absences in the following year (or roughly one less absence per teacher). He also estimates that an additional teacher absence reduces math achievement by about .002 standard deviations, implying that schools that failed to make AYP saw a similar boost in achievement because of improved teacher attendance. However, in a separate analysis, he shows that the threat of sanctions led to a .06 standard deviation improvement in math achievement in the following year, suggesting that improved teacher attendance accounted for just 3 percent of all accountability-driven achievement gains.
In addition to the general decline in teacher absences, the author finds that the probability of being frequently absent also decreased markedly as a result of failure to make AYP. For example, teachers were 20 percent less likely to be absent fifteen times or more. This matters because the impact of teacher absences on student achievement is cumulative. For example, having a teacher who is absent more than ten times in one year reduces achievement by .02 standard deviations relative to a teacher who isn’t—equivalent to replacing an average teacher with one in the bottom quintile of effectiveness. Interestingly, the threat of sanctions had the greatest effect on the attendance of teachers in the bottom quartile of the effectiveness distribution, though it’s unclear if those teachers had more initial absences.
Because North Carolina’s pre-NCLB accountability policies differed from those of other states, the results of this study aren’t nationally representative. However, they are broadly consistent with prior research on accountability and teacher effort, such as a Chicago study that found that teacher absences decreased when principals were empowered to dismiss probationary staff. As the author notes, because teacher attendance explains only a fraction of the change in test scores, “much remains to be learned about the channels through which test-based accountability policies raise student achievement.” Still, what we do know makes sense.
SOURCE: Seth Gershenson, "Performance Standards and Employee Effort: Evidence from Teacher Absences,"Journal of Policy Analysis and Management (April 2016).
