TY - JOUR AU - Figlio,David N. AU - Rouse,Cecilia TI - Do Accountability and Voucher Threats Improve Low-Performing Schools? JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 11597 PY - 2005 Y2 - September 2005 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w11597 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w11597.pdf N1 - Author contact info: David N. Figlio Institute for Policy Research Northwestern University 2040 Sheridan Road Evanston, IL 60208 Tel: 847-467-1503 Fax: 847-491-9916 E-Mail: figlio@northwestern.edu Cecilia E. Rouse Industrial Relations Section Firestone Library Princeton University Princeton, NJ 08544-1013 Tel: 609/258-6478 Fax: 609/258-0549 E-Mail: rouse@princeton.edu M2 - featured in NBER digest on 2005-09-12 AB - In this paper we study the effects of the threat of school vouchers and school stigma in Florida on the performance of "low-performing" schools using student-level data from a subset of districts. Estimates of the change in school-level high-stakes test scores from the first year of the reform are consistent with the early results used by the state of Florida to claim large-scale improvements associated with the threat of voucher assignment. However, we also find that much of this estimated effect may be due to other factors. While we estimate a small relative improvement in reading scores on the high-stakes test for voucher-threatened/stigmatized schools, we estimate a much smaller relative improvement on a lower-stakes, nationally norm-referenced, test. Further, the relative gains in reading scores are explained largely by changing student characteristics. We find more evidence for a positive differential effect on math test scores on both the low- and highstakes tests, however, the results from the lower-stakes test appear primarily limited to students in the high-stakes grade. Finally, we find some evidence that the relative improvements following the introduction of the A Plan by low-performing schools were more due to the stigma of receiving the low grade rather than the threat of vouchers. ER -