Testing, crime and punishment

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Figlio, DN
• 署名单位: State University System of Florida; University of Florida; National Bureau of Economic Research
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF PUBLIC ECONOMICS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0047-2727
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jpubeco.2005.01.003
• 发表日期: 2006
• 页码: 837-851
• 关键词: testing; School accountability; discipline; Education policy

摘要

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 data set constructed from the school district administrative records of a subset of the school districts in Florida during the 4 years surrounding the introduction of a high-stakes testing regime. It compares the suspensions of students involved in each of the 41,803 incidents in which two students were suspended and where prior 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 apparently act on the incentive to re-shape the testing pool through selective discipline in response to accountability pressures. (c) 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.