Program Design, Incentives, and Response: Evidence from Educational Interventions
22 Pages Posted: 16 Oct 2010
There are 2 versions of this paper
Program Design, Incentives, and Response: Evidence from Educational Interventions
Program Design, Incentives, and Response: Evidence from Educational Interventions
Date Written: October 2010
Abstract
In an effort to reform K-12 education, policymakers have introduced school vouchers - scholarships that make students eligible to transfer from public to private schools - in some U.S. school districts. This article analyzes two such educational interventions in the United States: the Milwaukee and Florida voucher programs. Under the Milwaukee program, vouchers were imposed from the outset, so that all low-income public school students became eligible for vouchers to transfer to private schools. In contrast, schools in the Florida program were only threatened with vouchers, with students of a particular school becoming eligible for vouchers only if the school received two "F" grades in a period of four years. Unlike the Milwaukee schools, Florida schools therefore had an incentive to avoid vouchers. Using school-level data from Florida and Wisconsin, this study shows that the performance effects of the threatened public schools under the Florida program have exceeded those of corresponding schools in Milwaukee. The lessons of the study are broadly applicable to New York City's educational reform efforts.
Keywords: Program design, Incentives
JEL Classification: H40, I21, I28
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
Do you have negative results from your research you’d like to share?
Recommended Papers
-
Rotten Apples: An Investigation of the Prevalence and Predictors of Teacher Cheating
By Brian Jacob and Steven D. Levitt
-
By Paul Glewwe, Nauman Ilias, ...
-
By Brian Jacob
-
Winning Isn't Everything: Corruption in Sumo Wrestling
By Mark Duggan and Steven D. Levitt
-
The Market for Teacher Quality
By Eric A. Hanushek, John F. Kain, ...
-
Food for Thought: The Effects of School Accountability Plans on School Nutrition
By David N. Figlio and Joshua Winicki
-
The Central Role of Noise in Evaluating Interventions that Use Test Scores to Rank Schools
By Kenneth Y. Chay, Patrick J. Mcewan, ...
-
Does School Accountability Lead to Improved Student Performance?