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Teacher Control System

Decent Essays

In “Left Behind by Design: Proficiency Counts and Test-based Accountability”, Neal and Schanzenbach(2010) use data from the Chicago Public Schools to analyze how the implementation of “No Child Left Behind Act(NCLB)” affect the distribution of measured changes in achievement among students. Specifically, this paper mainly focuses on examining how the rules that accountability systems use to turn student test scores into performance rankings for schools affect teacher’s allocation of efforts among different students. The data shows that the reading and math scores of students in the middle of achievement distribution increase the most. On the other hand, for students with the lowest academic ability, their reading and math scores do not …show more content…

In particular, since “gains” and “levels” incentive schemes focus on the average term, these two incentive schemes need to transform individual students’ academic performance into a single measure. As a result, such performance index might weight some students in class more than others. In order to maximize their expected return to efforts in terms of gains or levels on the standardized exam, teachers might triage certain students in class at the expense of others.

Given the performance index and the reward structure, teachers will allocate effort across students in the class based on the cost of effort and their expected marginal returns to effort. For example, when teachers are ranked and rewarded according to the class average levels, teachers will choose an optimal allocation of effort that maximizes the class average score on the standardized exam. Assume costs of effort are similar across students, teachers will focus more on students for whom the expected return to effort is the highest in terms of gains on the standardized exam. In contrast, teachers focus less on students with high initial academic ability because they believe that these students’ achievement gains are less likely to be rewarded due

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