Arbeitspapier

School Accountability: Can We Reward Schools and Avoid Pupil Selection?

School accountability schemes require measures of school performance, and these measures are in practice often based on pupil test scores. It is well-known that insufficiently correcting these test scores for pupil characteristics may provide incentives for inefficient pupil selection. We show that the trade-off between reward and pupil selection is not only a matter of sufficient information. A school accountability scheme that rewards school performance will create incentives for pupil selection, even under perfect information, unless the educational production function satisfies an (unrealistic) separability assumption. We propose different compromise solutions and discuss the resulting incentives in theory. The empirical relevance of our analysis - i.e., the rejection of the separability assumption and the magnitude of the incentives in the different compromise solutions - is illustrated with Flemish data.

Language
Englisch

Bibliographic citation
Series: IZA Discussion Papers ; No. 7420

Classification
Wirtschaft
National Government Expenditures and Education
Educational Finance; Financial Aid
Education and Inequality
Subject
school accountability
cream-skimming
educational production function

Event
Geistige Schöpfung
(who)
Ooghe, Erwin
Schokkaert, Erik
Event
Veröffentlichung
(who)
Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA)
(where)
Bonn
(when)
2013

Handle
Last update
10.03.2025, 11:44 AM CET

Data provider

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Object type

  • Arbeitspapier

Associated

  • Ooghe, Erwin
  • Schokkaert, Erik
  • Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA)

Time of origin

  • 2013

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