Public Policy Working Group: Robert Santillano
"Distribution Distortions from Test-Based Accountability in a Market-Based Setting"
Senior Research Fellow, Education Research Alliance for New Orleans
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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.
