A new study examines whether NCLB’s proficiency-based accountability system—which penalizes schools for not meeting state-established student achievement benchmarks—has any impact on student performance. Using student and school-level data from North Carolina, researchers compared student outcomes for schools that barely met or missed NCLB performance benchmarks and analyzed whether NCLB’s focus on proficiency negatively impacts schools’ high-performing students. Interestingly, the authors find evidence of slight gains in student performance in schools facing sanctions for the first time; the largest gains were in schools making management and leadership changes as a result of underperformance. The authors find no evidence that the threat of sanctions for low-performance negatively impacts higher-performing students; in fact, when schools are forced to make administrative changes due to chronically low performance, all students, including high performers, benefit. While this may appear to be great news for proponents of accountability systems that mirror NCLB, the authors highlight that North Carolina also has a state-specific accountability system in place that focuses on student growth rather than proficiency. Therefore, they caution that changes in student outcomes cannot be solely attributed to NCLB sanctions. Despite this limitation, however, the authors conclude that “school management or leadership problems constitute the single greatest obstacle to improved student performance.”
SOURCE: Thomas Ahn and Jacob Vigdor, “The Impact of No Child Left Behind’s Accountability Sanctions on School Performance: Regression Discontinuity Evidence from North Carolina,” National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper 20511 (September 2014).
