DOES IT PAY TO GET AN A? SCHOOL RESOURCE ALLOCATIONS IN RESPONSE TO ACCOUNTABILITY RATINGS

This paper examines whether school districts, and individual schools, respond to ratings from the accountability system by reallocating resources across or within schools. Our empirical work follows three identification strategies, a regression discontinuity for schools on the rating boundaries, a “rating shock” analysis for schools that face a change in rating when the state changed its accountability system, and a school fixed effects strategy. We find that school districts provided incentives for their schools to achieve higher ratings under the early accountability system, but under the later system they appear to have abandoned this strategy. In addition, the rating shock results suggest that some effort was directed towards assisting lower performing schools under the new regime. Finally, we find that in the early period incremental funds were used as much for ancillary purposes as instruction.