Despite frequent political and policy debates, the effects of imposing accountability pressures on public school teachers are empirically indeterminate. In this paper, we study the effects of accountability in the context of teacher responses to student behavioral infractions in the aftermath of teacher evaluation reforms. We leverage cross-state variation in the timing of state policy implementation to estimate whether teachers change the rate at which they remove students from their classrooms. We find that higher-stakes teacher evaluation had no causal effect on the rates of disciplinary referrals, and we find no evidence of heterogeneous effects for grades subject to greater accountability pressures or in schools facing differing levels of disciplinary infractions. Our results are precisely estimated and robust to a battery of specification checks. Our findings provide insights on the effects of accountability policy on the black-box of classroom practice and highlight the loose-coupling of education policy and teacher behaviors.
The effects of higher-stakes teacher evaluation on office disciplinary referrals
Keywords
teacher evaluation, accountability, school discipline, difference-in-differences
Education level
Document Object Identifier (DOI)
10.26300/gpx7-pn92
EdWorkingPaper suggested citation:
Liebowitz, David D., Lorna Porter, and Dylan Bragg. (). The effects of higher-stakes teacher evaluation on office disciplinary referrals. (EdWorkingPaper:
-159). Retrieved from
Annenberg Institute at Brown University: https://doi.org/10.26300/gpx7-pn92Related Resources from the EdExchange
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