Feeling the Florida Heat? How Low-Performing Schools Respond to Voucher and Accountability Pressure

This research could not have been undertaken without the help of many people. We thank Edward Freeland, Craig Deshenski, Kenneth Mease, Rob Santos, and Fritz Scheuren for their exceptional help with the survey and sample development. We appreciate the assistance of the Florida Department of Education in providing us both with administrative student data as well as with sampling frames for our survey analysis. Jay Pfeiffer, Jeff Sellers and others at the Florida Department of Education provided very helpful advice regarding Florida education policy and the administrative data used in the analysis. We also thank Emily Buchsbaum, Cynthia Casazza, Sarah Cohodes, Joseph Gasper, Scott Mildrum, Radha Iyendar, Ty Wilde, Grace Wong, and Nathan Wozny for expert research assistance and Jesse Rothstein, Analia Schlosser, Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach and seminar participants at Harvard University, McMaster University, the University of Chicago, the University of Florida, and the fall 2007 research conference of the National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research for extremely useful conversations and suggestions. Finally, we are indebted to the Annie E. Casey, Atlantic Philanthropies, Smith Richardson and Spencer Foundations, the U.S. Department of Education and the National Institutes of Health for financial support, but the views expressed in this paper do not necessarily represent those organizations supporting this research, the Florida Department of Education, or our host institutions. All errors in fact and interpretation are ours. The views expressed herein are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.