THE E FFICACY O F C HOICE T HREATS W ITHIN S CHOOL ACCOUNTABILITY S YSTEMS: R ESULTS FROM LEGISLATIVELY I NDUCED EXPERIMENTS

Targeted stigma and school voucher threats under a revised 2002 Florida accountability law have positive impacts on school performance as measured by the test score gains of their students. In contrast, stigma and public school choice threats under the US federal accountability law, No Child Left Behind, do not have similar effects in Florida. Estimation relies upon individual-level data and is based upon regression analyses that exploit discontinuities within the accountability regimes. Choice threats embedded within accountability regimes can moderate educational inequalities by boosting achievement at the lowest-performing schools, but policy design is crucial. With the growing recognition of the importance of human capital for economic growth, many nations are exploring ways of enhancing the productivity of their educational systems. 1 Two of the most widely discussed institutional reforms – school accountability and parental choice – are now being implemented in many parts of the US. 2 Of particular interest is the effort to combine the two reforms by giving parents a choice of another school when an accountability system indicates that the public school their child attends is inadequate. Such programmes typically give schools one year to improve before the parental choice threat is implemented. Two prominent examples of the use of parental choice as a threat to stimulate school improvement – the federal programme created by the public school choice provisions of the No Child Left Behind Act and the Opportunity Scholarships programme created by Florida’s Aþ Accountability Plan – are currently operating within that state. In this article, we use individual-level data to estimate the impact on student performance of the choice threats as well as of other features of these two accountability systems. Prior studies of the Florida programme have generally found positive impacts on the performance of schools placed under the threat that their students would become eligible for vouchers if the school failed to improve. However, these early studies were typically limited by the fact that the scholars had access only to school