What might school accountability do?

• Author: Figlio, David N.
• Position: Research Summaries - Brief Article

David N. Figlio (*)

Education is currently at the forefront of the nation's political agenda: everyone, regardless of political persuasion, wants to see an improvement in the performance of U.S. schools. This consensus ends abruptly, however, when it comes to determining how to effect such a change in performance. One popular approach is to increase the accountability of schools to the public, by assessing schools on the basis of improvements in students' performance on standardized examinations and by offering remedies, such as increased choice (either within the public sector or through vouchers for private schools), reconstitution, or closure, in the event of persistent identified failure of a school to improve. School accountability is the centerpiece of President George W. Bush's education reform proposal, and in dozens of states, other accountability measures have been proposed or implemented.

This past summer, both the U.S. Senate and the U.S. House of Representatives passed education reform bills that set stringent standards for schools to meet. Both bills require states to test students in the third through eighth grades and to identify schools that, on the basis of the test results, fail to make "adequate yearly progress." Although the definition of adequate yearly progress is still ambiguous, both bills include provisions requiring that students who attend schools that fail to make such progress be granted additional public-school choice. In both bills, schools that persistently fail will be subject to increasingly severe sanctions, including reorganization or closure of the school. Both the House and the Senate bills have significant teeth: intriguing recent work by Thomas J. Kane, Douglas O. Staiger, and Jeffrey Geppert suggests that the vast majority of U.S. schools would face at least moderate sanctions under either bill. (1)

Much of my current research centers around issues related to school accountability. My work on accountability follows several strands. One strand, still in its infancy, involves school responses to accountability systems. In joint work with Cecilia Rouse, Dan D. Goldhaber, and Jane Hannaway, I am studying how Florida schools have changed their instructional policies, practices, and allocations of resources within and between schools as a result of increased accountability. In other work, which is being conducted in Florida, Virginia, and elsewhere, I am investigating noninstructional responses to accountability systems. Several specific projects along these lines study whether increased scrutiny has led to the removal of "problem" students from threatened schools (either by relabeling them as "disabled" or by active redrawing of school boundaries), as well as whether schools respond to accountability systems by manipulating school nutrition programs (that is, changing school menus during testing periods to i ncrease nutrients that might stimulate short-term performance) in attempts to boost test performance. A second strand of research considers the often unintended consequences of design issues associated with school accountability. The specific design of an accountability system may have dramatic consequences for school choice, for instance, or for other factors not directly related to education. This essay focuses on my early work on this second strand of research.

Design Matters

There are a number of ways to measure a school's performance. One approach is to rate schools on the basis of some value-added measure, following the same students over time to gauge improvements in their...