The Effects of Qualitative Accountability on School Improvement Efforts: Evidence from New York City

A critical component of performance evaluation in education is feedback. Increasingly, school-level accountability systems in the United States have featured qualitative evaluations by outside experts to complement test-based accountability and provide schools with formative feedback to help them improve. This paper exploits the staggered implementation of a school accountability system in New York City between 2009 and 2014. Employing a fuzzy regression discontinuity design, I examine the effects of additional evaluation and feedback on other measures of school quality, primarily student outcomes, and teacher practice. I find some effects of quality review on teacher practice, but results on academic outcomes are small and sensitive to specification. Higher review scores predict test score gains, suggesting the reviews have value as a leading indicator.