Impacts of High School Accountability on Educational Attainment, and Returns to Schooling for Affected Students

• In Event: Roundtable Session 124
  In Roundtable Session: The Impact of Accountability on Subgroups

Abstract

Schools may respond to high school exit exam and consequential accountability policies by shifting resources to students at risk of failing a high-stakes exam. We find that these policies in the late 1990s decreased the average years of schooling for economically disadvantaged students and may have increased the inequality of educational achievement between poor and rich schools. We then use the variation in schooling induced by these policies to examine affected students' returns to education. Specifically, we use two stage least squares, relying on policy timing interacted with individual and county characteristics as a source of conditionally exogenous variation in schooling. The estimated local average treatment effect is the return to education for affected subgroups.

Author

• Joanne Lee, Mathematica Policy Research, Inc.