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Making Teachers Accountable
Abstract and Figures
Suggests the reasons for teacher accountability reforms and reviews the approaches available, successes, and examples of evaluating incentives to discover design flaws. One type of policy for reform is contract tenure reforms, which does not hire a person into the civil service or grant tenure; normally lasts for one year; occurs in most developing countries, Australia, the United Kingdom, the United States, and some OECD countries; and has the objective of creating flexibility in hiring and firing teachers and creating better incentives for performance. Pay-for-performance reform addresses the facts that teachers’ raises are based more on seniority and tenure than on results or performance and creates incentives and means of providing merit pay or bonuses for outcomes. Schools with pay-for-performance successes have many of the following characteristics: weak systems for accountability before implementation; low professionalism among teachers before implementation; and large bonuses relative to salary as an incentive. Controllability and predictability ratings provide information about the design of the reform program by examining the strength of incentives.
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School-based management (SBM) in Thailand began in 1997 in the course of a reform aimed at overcoming a profound crisis in the education system. The present contribution reports on the introduction and institutionalisation of decentralisation and SBM with community participation in Thailand. The data reported here are based on an empirical survey of 1,000 school-board members from Bangkok as well as provincial and rural areas which was followed by 45 interviews with all relevant stakeholders. The results of the study are promising, as they show broad support for the reform among school principals as well as board members. However, they also reveal a continuing need to train principals and board members in educational leadership and management.
The Kentucky Education Reform Act (KERA), implemented in 1990, is one of the most ambitious and influential education reform policies ever attempted by any state. KERA's main components include a new funding system to correct large financial disparities between school districts, curriculum revision and standardization, and increased school and district accountability. In this paper I explore KERA's effects on school spending and student achievement. I find that KERA did successfully equalize per-pupil expenditures across rich and poor districts and that this equalization has been sustained throughout the decade since KERA's passage. KERA's effects on student achievement have been more modest. Black students in Kentucky have experienced modest test score gains since KERA's implementation, but the scores of white students have remained unchanged relative to their peers in surrounding states. I also find no evidence that KERA narrowed the gap in test scores between rich and poor districts. Instrumental variables estimates suggest the increased spending induced by KERA did not improve test scores.
A recent study of charter schools' effect on student achievement has been published by CREDO (2009). It contains a statistical mistake that causes a biased estimate of how charter schools affect achievement. This paper explains that mistake. Essentially, the achievement of charter school students is measured with much more error than the achievement of the controls, which are not individual students but are group averages of students in the traditional public schools. By using the achievement data as both the dependent variable and (lagged) an independent variable, the CREDO study forces the estimated effect of charter schools to be biased, and the bias is negative unless the CREDO data are very atypical of administrative achievement data. This paper also notes that the CREDO study violates four rules for the empirically sound use of matching methods to evaluate charter schools' effects.
The authors are responsible for the content of this report. We owe an enormous debt of gratitude to Jonah Rockoff, whose clear-sighted thinking is behind solutions to many problems in this analysis. We analyze the achievement of 93 percent of the New York City charter school students who were enrolled in test-taking grades (grades 3 through 12) in 2000-01 through 2007-08. More than 94 percent of charter school applicants participate in admissions lotteries. The lotteries are crucial for remedying the self-selection problem because charter school applicants are substantially more likely to be black and poor than students in the traditional public schools. Using the lotteries to form an intention-to-treat variable, we instrument for actual enrollment and compute the charter schools' average treatment-on-the-treated effects on achievement. These are 0.09 standard deviations per year of treatment in math and 0.06 standard deviations per year of treatment in reading. These results are robust, as shown by specification tests for various issues: non-matching, attrition, retention-in-grade, returning to the traditional public schools, and so on. The results do not differ statistically significantly by the race/ethnicity of the student, the gender of the student, the number of years we observe the student, or the lotteried-in percentage of the school. We estimate associations (not causal relationships) between charter schools' policies and their effects on achievement. Policies with fairly consistent positive associations with achievement include a long school year; a greater number of minutes devoted to English during each school day; a small rewards/small penalties disciplinary policy; teacher pay based somewhat on performance or duties, as opposed to a traditional pay scale based strictly on seniority and credentials; and a mission statement that emphasizes academic performance, as opposed to other goals.