期刊名称：Discussion Paper Series / Department of Economics, New York University
出版年度：2004
卷号：1
出版社：New York University
摘要：Several countries have implemented programs that use test scores to rank schools, and to
reward or penalize them based on their students’ average performance. Recently, Kane and
Staiger (2002) have warned that imprecision in the measurement of school-level test scores
could impede these efforts. There is little evidence, however, on how seriously noise hinders
the evaluation of the impact of these interventions. We examine these issues in the context
of Chile’s P-900 program—a country-wide intervention in which resources were allocated
based on cutoffs in schools’ mean test scores. We show that transitory noise in average
scores and mean reversion lead conventional estimation approaches to greatly overstate the
impacts of such programs. We then show how a regression discontinuity design that utilizes
the discrete nature of the selection rule can be used to control for reversion biases. While
the RD analysis provides convincing evidence that the P-900 program had significant effects
on test score gains, these effects are much smaller than is widely believed.
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