Testing, Crime and Punishment

From the abstract : "This paper investigates whether schools may employ discipline for misbehavior as a tool to bolster aggregate test performance. To do so, this paper utilizes an extraordinary dataset constructed from the school district administrative records of a subset of the school districts in Florida during the four years surrounding the introduction of a high-stakes testing regime. It compare the suspensions of students involved in each of the 41,803 incidents in which two students were suspended and where prior year test scores for both students are observed. While schools always tend to assign harsher punishments to low-performing students than to high-performing students throughout the year, this gap grows substantially during the testing window. Moreover, this testing window-related gap is only observed for students in testing grades. In summary, schools apparent act on the incentive to re-shape the testing pool through selective discipline in response to accountability pressures." Source : NBER

Download PDF Paper (available to Stanford Network)