Accountability, Ability and Disability: Gaming the System?

This paper utilizes highly detailed student-level data to examine whether the initiation of a high-stakes test for accountability purposes affected Florida public schools’ decisions regarding whether to assign students to special education. Using student-level fixed effects models, we find that schools systematically placed students from low socio-economic status backgrounds and historically low-performing students into special education categories that were at the time exempt from the accountability system. High-poverty schools are significantly more likely to reclassify low-achieving students than are more affluent schools. These results provide important implications for the design of school accountability systems.