Should No Child Left Behind Be Reauthorized? The Impact of Accountability Pressure on Teachers and Students

On January 8, 2002, President George W. Bush signed the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act. This controversial legislation, considered the most influential education reform in decades, is currently up for reauthorization.

The impact of NCLB on educational outcomes is hotly debated in the media, though surprisingly little academic research has focused on its implications. The studies that do exist focus almost exclusively on high-stakes testing in a particular city or state. But a recent study in the American Economic Journal is the first to look at the impact of NCLB incentives on teacher behaviors and student achievements nationwide.

NCLB mandates that states hold schools accountable for student performance on state math and reading exams, report the number of students making Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP), and impose penalties on schools that do not meet AYP. However, individual states decide the specific criteria for AYP and have their own standardized tests.

As a result, a school that is certain to meet AYP in one state might be in danger of not achieving AYP in another. This variation in AYP criteria by state allows the researchers to estimate the average impact of NCLB pressure on schools at risk of not meeting AYP, referred to throughout the study as “schools below the AYP margin”.

By exploiting variation in AYP standards across states to create a difference-in-differences model, the researchers isolate the impact of a school’s proximity to the AYP margin from other confounding factors such as regional trends and the composition of the student body. This allows them to create unbiased estimates of average nationwide differences between schools above and below the AYP margin.

To estimate the impact of NCLB pressure on student achievement, the researchers look at student outcomes on a low-stakes, nationwide test called the Early Childhood Longitudinal Survey. The purpose of looking at this test rather than the high-stakes state exams is twofold. First, it allows the researchers to standardize student performance comparisons across states. Second, it decreases the likelihood that performance gains are attributed to teachers solely focusing on preparing students for the exams. The researchers find that NCLB pressure on schools below the AYP margin has a positive effect on test scores in reading, and a neutral effect on scores in math and science.

Critically, the study suggests that students in schools below the AYP margin do not report decreased enjoyment of reading and math and do report a 16 percent decrease in their likelihood of experiencing testing anxiety.

In addition to concerns about NCLB’s impact on student achievement, critics often argue that NCLB negatively impacts teacher morale in high-stakes grade levels and subject areas at low-performing schools. To test this theory, the researchers look at the difference in the number of teachers who agree with this statement: “I worry about the security of my job because of the performance of my students on state and/or local tests.” Teachers at schools below the AYP margin are 9.7 percentage points more likely than teachers at schools above the AYP margin to worry about the impact of student test performance on their job security.

The researchers also look at the impact of greater accountability pressure on the allocation of human capital within a school. Greater accountability pressure is associated with an increase in hours worked by specialists (who work with small groups of students in core subjects) and a decrease in hours worked by generalists (who teach multiple subjects in self-contained classrooms). Hours devoted to whole class instruction fall for both groups.

The evidence also suggests that accountability pressure leads to less time devoted to science and social studies: teachers at schools below the AYP margin are approximately 15 percentage points less likely to have taught a science or social studies lesson in the previous week.

The findings indicate that teachers in schools below the AYP margin alter their practices in response to NCLB accountability pressures with mixed results. This pressure has positive to neutral effects on student performance on low-stakes tests, suggesting that student learning is not harmed by these adjustments. However, teachers in schools below the AYP margin do report greater concerns about job security, suggesting that accountability pressure may negatively impact teacher morale.

Due to limitations of the data set, these estimates only consider the impact of the first two years of NCLB. As policymakers debate the renewal of NCLB, one consideration is whether or not these effects alter or fade over time.

Article Source: “Under Pressure: Job Security, Resource Allocation, and Productivity in Schools under No Child Left Behind”, Reback, Randall, Jonah Rockoff, and Healther L. Schwartz, American Economic Journal: Education Policy, 2014. 

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