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Murphy Institute Events

Robert Santillano, Public Policy Working Group

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Senior Research Fellow, Education Research Alliance for New Orleans

"Distribution Distortions from Test-Based Accountability in a Market-Based Setting"

Location

Uptown Campus
Lavin-Bernick Center
202-Rechler Conference Room

Meeting time is 12:00 – 1:00pm. Lunch will be provided. The meeting is open only to members of the Health Policy Working Group.

Event Details

Invitation Only

Event Type: Public Policy Working Group

Sponsored By: Murphy Institute , Center for Public Policy Research

More Information

About The Speaker

Dr. Santillano joined the Education Research Alliance team after spending five years as a research economist at Mathematica Policy Research. He received his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, where his dissertation focused on the integration of immigrant students in public schools. He will present work on the relationship between school accountability policies and market-based education reforms. Specifically, Louisiana’s test-based accountability system incentivizes schools to distort the distribution of scores in favor of students close to proficiency thresholds. Market-based reforms may intensify these distortions since schools are now competing for students, make autonomous resource-allocation decisions, and face more direct shut-down pressures.

Dr. Santillano will present research on whether there is evidence of schools responding to these distortionary incentives in the state, and test whether they have intensified in New Orleans after market-based reforms were introduced. The work is joint with Era-NO colleagues, Doug Harris and Jon Valant.

The Murphy Institute

Established in memory of Charles H. Murphy, Sr. (1870-1954), and inspired by the vision of Charles H. Murphy, Jr. (1920-2002), The Murphy Institute exists to help Tulane faculty and students understand economic, moral, and political problems we all face and think about. More important, it exists to help us understand how these problems have come to be so closely interconnected.