TY  - JOUR
AU  - Cullen,Julie Berry
AU  - Reback,Randall
TI  - Tinkering Toward Accolades: School Gaming Under a Performance Accountability System
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 12286
PY  - 2006
Y2  - June 2006
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w12286
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w12286.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Julie Berry Cullen
Department of Economics - 0508
University of California, San Diego
9500 Gilman Drive
La Jolla, CA 92093-0508
Tel: 858/822-2056
Fax: 858/534-7040
E-Mail: jbcullen@ucsd.edu

Randall Reback
Dept. of Economics
Barnard College, Columbia University
3009 Broadway
New York, NY 10027-6598
Tel: 2128545005
Fax: 2128548947
E-Mail: rreback@barnard.edu
AB  - We explore the extent to which schools manipulate the composition of students in the test-taking pool in order to maximize ratings under Texas' accountability system in the 1990s.  We first derive predictions from a static model of administrators' incentives given the structure of the ratings criteria, and then test these predictions by comparing differential changes in exemption rates across student subgroups within campuses and across campuses and regimes.  Our analyses uncover evidence of a moderate degree of strategic behavior, so that there is some tension between designing systems that account for heterogeneity in student populations and that are manipulation-free.
ER  -