The Efficacy of Choice Threats Within School Accountability Systems: Results from Legislatively Induced Experiments

Targeted stigma and school voucher threats under a revised 2002 Florida accountability law have positive impacts on school performance as measured by the test score gains of their students. In contrast, stigma public school choice threats under the U.S. federal accountability law, No Child Left Behind, do not have similar effects in Florida. Estimations rely upon individual-level data and are based upon regression analyses that exploit discontinuities within the accountability regimes. Choice threats embedded within accountability regimes can moderate educational inequalities by boosting achievement at the lowest-performing schools, but policy design is crucial. JEL Classification: I2 THE EFFICACY OF CHOICE THREATS WITHIN SCHOOL ACCOUNTABILITY SYSTEMS: RESULTS FROM LEGISLATIVELY INDUCED EXPERIMENTS Martin R. West and Paul E. Peterson With the growing recognition of the importance of human capital for economic growth, many nations are exploring ways of enhancing the productivity of their educational systems. Two of the most widely discussed institutional reforms—school accountability and parental choice—are now being implemented in many parts of the United States. Of particular interest is the effort to combine the two reforms by giving parents a choice of another school when an accountability system indicates that the public school their child attends is inadequate. Such programs typically give schools one year to improve before the parental choice “threat” is implemented. Two prominent examples of the use of parental choice as a threat to stimulate school improvement—the federal program created by the public school choice provisions of the No Child Left Behind Act and the Opportunity Scholarships program created by Florida’s A+ Accountability Plan—are currently operating within that state. In this paper, we use individuallevel data to estimate the impact on student performance of the choice threats as well as of other features of these two accountability systems. Prior studies of the Florida program have generally found positive impacts on the performance of schools placed under the threat that their students would become eligible for vouchers if the school failed to improve. However, these early studies were typically limited by the fact that the scholars had access only to school-level data, not the test scores and demographic characteristics of individual students (Chakrabarti, 2004; Greene, 2001; Greene and Winters, 2003). As a result, it is unknown from their results whether gains constituted actual improvements in the performance of individual students or were due to changes in the 1 We wish to thank Commissioner John Winn, Christy Hovanetz, Jeff Sellers, and other officials at the Florida Department of Education for supplying the information for the analysis reported in this paper, William G. Howell for his help in designing the analysis, and Matthew Chingos for expert research assistance. The authors alone are responsible for the findings and interpretations reported. 2 The essays in Peterson and West (2003) examine the political origins of the school accountability policies of the federal No Child Left Behind Act and research on accountability systems in place before the law’s passage; Carnoy and Loeb (2003) and Hanushek and Raymond (2004) provide additional evidence on the impact of accountability systems on student achievement. Studies that have estimated the impact of attending private schools or charter schools on the performance of individual students, and the impact of regimes that allow a wider range of choice on public-school performance include Howell and Peterson (2002), Hoxby (2004a), Ladd (2002), and Neal (2002).