Working Paper: NBER ID: w11194
Authors: David N. Figlio
Abstract: The recent passage of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 solidified a national trend toward increased student testing for the purpose of evaluating public schools. This new environment for schools provides strong incentives for schools to alter the ways in which they deliver educational services. This paper investigates whether schools may employ discipline for misbehavior as a tool to bolster aggregate test performance. To do so, this paper utilizes an extraordinary dataset constructed from the school district administrative records of a subset of the school districts in Florida during the four years surrounding the introduction of a high-stakes testing regime. It compare the suspensions of students involved in each of the 41,803 incidents in which two students were suspended and where prior year test scores for both students are observed. While schools always tend to assign harsher punishments to low-performing students than to high-performing students throughout the year, this gap grows substantially during the testing window. Moreover, this testing window-related gap is only observed for students in testing grades. In summary, schools apparent act on the incentive to re-shape the testing pool through selective discipline in response to accountability pressures.
Keywords: School Accountability; Discipline; Test Performance; High-Stakes Testing
JEL Codes: I2
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| prior test scores (C52) | suspension lengths (Y20) |
| suspension lengths (Y20) | student attendance during testing (C90) |
| testing window (C99) | suspension lengths (Y20) |
| low-performing students (I24) | longer suspensions during testing (C41) |
| high-performing students (D29) | shorter suspensions during testing (C41) |