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theses

This dissertation studies the impact of school accountability on student outcomes - test scores and peer group composition. By examining both federal and state accountability systems, I seek to expand our understanding of the role of school accountability. Under the federal accountability, the No Child Left Behind policy, public schools are mandated to be held accountable for student achievement by race and ethnicity. The threat of sanctions may incentivize schools to reallocate school resources towards specific racial and ethnic groups to improve their achievement. In Chapter 2, I examine the policy to see whether schools improve achievement of black students at the expense of whites' achievement when the black subgroups miss annual proficiency goals, but the white groups meet them. Analyzing two nationwide data files, the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study and the Barnard/Columbia NCLB Database, I do not find strong evidence for this. Instead, I find that there is a large improvement in black student math scores and white reading scores when both blacks and whites fail. I find that the improvement comes from highly proficient students.

In Chapter 3, I seek to understand whether test-based school accountability decreases the racial diversity of a student population in schools to understand how school ratings affects a racial composition of children' peer groups. Examining North Carolina school accountability, I find that in low-performing schools during the post-policy period, the share of black students statistically significantly falls relative to the control schools over time while the share of white students statistically significantly rises relative to the control group of schools. My findings imply that the racial diversity increases since white student enrollment increases in schools where the majority of a student population is black.

ETD_9242

doi:10.7282/T3JQ14NV

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

by Jieun Choi

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.